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ROBERT E. LEE 

THE SOUTHERNER 



ROBERT E. LEE 

THE SOUTHERNER 



BY 

THOMAS NELSON PAGE 



fi fe?!/' dyyeiXov AaKedainoviots 6tl r^Se 
Kelfieda roTs Kelviov p-^/xaai Teidd/nevoc. 



WITH PORTRAIT 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'iS SONS 
NEW YORK : : : : : 1908 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Tv/o Copies Received 

OCT 24 1908 

Oopyriirht Entry 
CLASi; a. XXc, No. 



COC 



A 



V 






Copyright, iqo8, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published October, 1908 




TO THE MEMORY OF 
"as gallant and brave an army 

AS EVER existed": 

THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA.* 

ON WHOSE IMPERISHABLE DEEDS 

AND INCOMPARABLE CONSTANCY 

THE FAME OF THEIR OLD COMMANDER 

WAS FOUNDED 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Introductory ix 

I. Early Life 3 

II. First Service 13 

III. The Choice of Hercules 30 

IV. Resources 57 

V. Lee in West Virginia 71 

VI. The Situation when Lee Took Com- 
mand 84 

VII. Battles Around Richmond .... 96 

VIII. Lee Relieves Richmond 109 

IX. Lee's Audacity — Antietam and Chan- 

cellorsville 122 

X. Lee's Clemency 153 

XI. Gettysburg 174 

XII. The Wilderness Campaign .... 204 

XIII. Lee and Grant 213 

XIV. The Retreat to Appomattox . . .237 

vii 



• ■^ 



viii CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 



XV. Lee in Defeat . . . . . . . . . 253 

XVI. After the War 261 

XVII. Lee as College President .... 269 

XVIII. Sources of Character 284 

XIX. The Heritage of the South . . . 290 

Appendix 293 

Index 307 



INTRODUCTORY 

^ I ^HIS sketch of a great Virginian is not writ- 
ten with the expectation or with even the 
hope that the writer can add anything to the 
fame of Lee; but rather in obedience to a 
feehng that as the son of a Confederate soldier, 
as a Southerner, as an American, he owes some- 
thing to himself and to his countrymen, which he 
should endeavor to pay, though it may be but a 
mite cast into the Treasury of Abundance. 

The subject is not one to be dealt with in the 
language of eulogy. To attempt to decorate it 
with panegyric would but belittle it. What the 
writer proposes to say will be based upon public 
records, or on the testimony of those personal 
witnesses who by character and opportunity for 
observation would be held to furnish evidence 
by which the gravest concerns of life would be 
decided. 

True enough it is, Lee was assailed — and as- 
sailed with a rancor and persistence which have 
undoubtedly left their deep impression on the 
minds of a large section of his countrymen; but 
as the years pass by, the passions and prejudices 



X INTRODUCTORY 

which attempted to destroy him have been grad- 
ually giving place to a juster conception of the 
lineaments of Truth. 

"Seest thou not how they revile thee?" said 
a youth to Diogenes. 

"Yea," repKed the Philosopher. "But seest 
thou not how I am not reviled ^" 

Thus, as we read to-day of the reviling of 
Lee by those who under the sway of passion 
endeavored to stigmatize with the terms, " Reb- 
el" and "Traitor," one whom history is already 
proclaiming, possibly, the loftiest character of 
his time, the soul is filled, not so much with 
loathing for their malignity, as with pity for 
their blindness. 

Unhappily, the world judges mainly by the 
measure of success, and though Time hath his 
revenges, and finally rights many wrongs, the 
man who fails of an immediate end appears to 
the body of his contemporaries, and often to 
the generations following, to be a failure. Yet 
from such seed as this have sprung the richest 
fruits of civilization. In the Divine Economy, 
indeed, appears a wonderful mystery. Through 
all the history of sublime endeavor would seem 
to run the strange truth enunciated by the Di- 
vine Master: that. He who loses his life for the 
sake of the Truth shall find it. 



INTRODUCTORY xi 

But although, as was said by the eloquent 
Holcombe of Lee just after his death, "No cal- 
umny can ever darken his fame, for History has 
lighted up his image with her everlasting lamp," 
yet after forty years there appears in certain 
quarters a tendency to rank General Lee, as a 
soldier, among those captains who failed. Some 
historians, looking with narrow vision at but one 
side, and many readers ignorant of all the facts, 
honestly take this view. A general he was, they 
say, able enough for defense; but he was uni- 
formly defeated when he took the offensive. 
He failed at Antietam, he was defeated at Get- 
tysburg; he could not drive Grant out of Vir- 
ginia; therefore he must be classed among cap- 
tains of the second rank only. 

Iteration and reiteration, to the ordinary ob- 
server, however honest he may be, gather ac- 
cumulated force and oftentimes usurp the place 
of truth. The Pubhc has not time nor does it 
care to go deeper than the ordinary presentation 
of a case. It is possible, therefore, that unless 
the truth be set forth so plainly that it cannot 
be mistaken, this estimate of Lee as a Captain 
may in time become established as a general, 
if not as the universal opinion of the Public. 

If, however, Lee's reputation becomes estab- 
lished as among the second class of captains, 



xii INTRODUCTORY 

rather than as among the first, the responsibihty 
for it will rest, not upon Northern writers, but 
upon the Southerners themselves. For the facts 
are plain. 

We of the South have been wont to leave the 
writing of history mainly to others, and it is far 
from a complete excuse that whilst others were 
writing history we were making it. It is as much 
the duty of a people to disprove any charge 
blackening their fame as it is of an individual. 
Indeed, the injury is infinitely more far-reach- 
ing in the former case than in the case of an 
individual. 

It is no part of my purpose to undertake to 
discuss critically the great campaigns which 
Lee conducted or battles which he fought. This 
I must leave to those military scholars whose ex- 
perience entitles their judgment to respect. I 
shall mainly confine myself to setting forth the 
conditions which existed and the results of the 
manner in which he met the forces which con- 
fronted him. 

It is, therefore, rather of Lee, the man, that 
I propose to speak in this brief memoir, though 
incidentally I shall endeavor to direct the read- 
er's thought to one especial phase of his work 
as a soldier, for it appears to me to illustrate 
the peculiar fibre which distinguished him 



INTRODUCTORY xiii 

from other great Captains and other great men. 
His character I deem absolutely the fruit of the 
Virginian civilization which existed in times 
past. No drop of blood alien to Virginia 
coursed in his veins; his rearing v^as wholly 
within her borders and according to the prin- 
ciples of her life. 

Whatever of praise or censure, therefore, 
shall be his must fall fairly on his mother, Vir- 
ginia, and the civilization which existed within 
her borders. The history of Lee is the history 
of the South during the greatest crisis of her 
existence. For with his history is bound up the 
history of the Army of Northern Virginia, on 
whose imperishable deeds and incomparable 
constancy rests his fame. 

The reputation of the South has suffered be- 
cause we have allowed rhetoric to usurp the 
place of history. We have furnished many 
orators, but few historians. But all history at 
last must be the work not of the orator, but of 
the historian. Truth, simply stated, Hke chas- 
tity in a woman's face, is its own best advocate; 
its simplest presentation is its strongest proof 

It is then, not to Lee the Victorious, that the 
writer asks his reader's attention, but to that 
greater Lee: the Defeated. 



ROBERT E. LEE, 
THE SOUTHERNER 



ROBERT E. LEE, THE SOUTHERNER 

" A Prince once said of a Monarch slain, 
'Taller he seems in Death.'" 

CHAPTER I 

EARLY LIFE 

/^N a plateau about a mile from the south 
bank of the Potomac River, in the old Colo- 
nial County of Westmoreland, in what used to be 
known as the "Northern Neck," that portion of 
Virginia which Charles II. in his heedlessness 
once undertook to grant to his friends and favor- 
ites, Culpeper and Arlington, stands a massive 
brick mansion, one of the most impressive piles 
of brick on this continent, which even in its di- 
lapidation looks as though it might have been 
built by Elizabeth and bombarded by Cromwell. 
It was built by Thomas Lee, grandson of Rich- 
ard Lee, the emigrant, who came to Virginia 
about 1641-2, and founded a family which has 
numbered among its members as many men of 
distinction as any family in America. It was 

3 



4 ROBERT E. LEE 

through him that Charles II., when an exile in 
Brussels, is said to have been offered an asylum 
and a Kingdom in Virginia. When the first 
mansion erected was destroyed by fire. Queen 
Anne, in recognition of the services of her 
faithful Counsellor in Virginia, sent over a 
liberal contribution towards its rebuilding. It 
bears the old English name, Stratford, after the 
English estate of Richard Lee, and for many 
generations — down to the last generation, it was 
the home of the Lees of Virginia. 

This mansion has a unique distinction among 
historical houses in this country; for in one of 
its chambers were born two signers of the 
Declaration of Independence: Richard Henry 
Lee, who, in obedience to the mandate of the 
Virginia Convention, moved the Resolution in 
Congress to declare the Colonies free and inde- 
pendent States, and Francis Lightfoot Lee, his 
brother. But it has a yet greater distinction. 
In one of its chambers was born on the 19th of 
January, 1807, Robert E. Lee, whom we of the 
South believe to have been not only the greatest 
soldier of his time, and the greatest captain of 
the English-speaking race, but the loftiest char- 
acter of his generation; one rarely equalled, 
and possibly never excelled, in all the annals of 
the human race. 



EARLY LIFE 5 

His reputation as a soldier has been dealt with 
by those much better fitted to speak of it than 
I; and in what I have to say as to this I shall 
but follow them. The campaigns in which that 
reputation was achieved are now the studies of 
all military students throughout the world, quite 
as much as are the campaigns of Hannibal and 
Caesar, of Cromwell and Marlborough; of Na- 
poleon and Wellington. 

"According to my notion of military history," 
says Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley, " there is 
as much instruction both in strategy and in 
tactics to be gleaned from General Lee's oper- 
ations of 1862 as there is to be found in Na- 
poleon's campaigns of 1796." 

Robert Edward Lee was the second son of 
"Light Horse Harry" Lee (who in his youth 
had been the gallant young commander of the 
"Partisan Legion") and of Anne Carter, of 
Shirley, his second wife, a pious and gracious 
representative of the old Virginia family whose 
home still stands in simple dignity upon the 
banks of the James, and has been far-famed 
for generations as one of the best known seats 
of the old Virginia hospitality. In his veins 
flowed the best blood of the gentry of the Old 
Dominion and, for that matter, of England, 
and surrounding his life from his earliest child- 



6 ROBERT E. LEE 

hood were the best traditions of the old Virginia 
Hfe. Amid these, and these alone, he grew to 
manhood. On both sides of his house his an- 
cestors for generations had been councillors 
and governors of Virginia, and had contributed 
their full share towards Virginia's greatness. 
Richard Lee was a scion of an old family, an- 
cient enough to have fought at Hastings and 
to have followed Richard of the Lion Heart to 
the Holy Land.* On this side of the water they 
had ever stood among the highest. The history 
of no two families was more indissolubly bound 
up with the history of Virginia than that of the 
Lees and the Carters. Thus, Lee was essentially 
the type of the Cavalier of the Old Dominion to 
whom she owed so much of her glory. Like Sir 
Walter Raleigh he could number a hundred 
gentlemen among his kindred and, even at his 
greatest, he was in character the type of his order. 
It has been well said that knowledge of a 
man's ideals is the key to his character. Tell us 
his ideals and we can tell you what manner of 
man he is. Lee's ideal character was close at 
hand from his earliest boyhood. His earliest 
days were spent in a region filled with traditions 
of him who, having consecrated his life to duty, 
had attained such a standard of virtue that if 

* "Lee of Virginia." By Edmund I. Lee. 



EARLY LIFE 7 

we would liken him to other governors we must 
go back to Marcus AureHus, to St. Louis and 
to William the Silent. 

Not far from Stratford, within an easy ride, 
in the same old colonial county of Westmore- 
land, on the bank of the same noble river whose 
broad waters reflect the arching sky, there 
spanning Virginia and Maryland, was Wake- 
field, the plantation which had the distinction 
of having given birth to the Father of His 
Country. Thus, on this neighborhood, the 
splendor of the evening of his noble life just 
closed had shed a peculiar glory. And not a great 
way off, in a neighboring county on the banks of 
the same river, was the home of his manhood, 
where in majestic simplicity his ashes repose, 
making Mt. Vernon a shrine for lovers of Lib- 
erty of every age and every clime. 

On the wall at Shirley, Lee's mother's home, 
among the portraits of the Carters hangs a full- 
length portrait of Washington in a general's 
uniform, given by him to General Nelson who 
gave it to his daughter, Mrs. Carter. Thus, in 
both his ancestral homes the boy from his 
cradle found an atmosphere redolent at once 
of the greatness of Virginia's past and of the 
memory of the preserver of his country. 

It was Lee's own father, the gallant and gifted 



8 ROBERT E. LEE 

"Light Horse Harry" Lee, who, as eloquent in 
debate as he had been eager in battle, had 
been selected by Congress to deliver the me- 
morial address on Washington, and had coined 
the golden phrase which, reaching the heart of 
America, has become his epitaph and declared 
him by the unanimous voice of a grateful people, 
"First in war, first in peace, and first in the 
hearts of his countrymen." 

How passionately the memory of "Light 
Horse Harry" Lee was revered by his sons we 
know, not only from the life of Robert E. Lee, 
himself; but from that most caustic of American 
philippics: the "Observations on the Writings 
of Thomas Jefferson, with Particular Reference 
to the Attacks they contain on the Memory of the 
Late General Henry Lee, in a Series of Letters 
by Henry Lee of Virginia." 

Mr. Jefferson with all his prestige and genius 
had found a match when he aroused "Black 
Harry" Lee by a charge of ingratitude on the 
part of his father to the adored Washington. 
In no family throughout Virginia was Washing- 
ton's name more revered than among the Lees, 
who were bound to him by every tie of gratitude, 
of sentiment, and of devotion. 

Thus, the impress of the character of Wash- 
ington was natural on the plastic and serious 



EARLY LIFE 9 

mind of the thoughtful son of ''Light Horse 
Harry." 

One familiar with the hfe of Lee cannot help 
noting the strong resemblance of his character 
in its strength, its poise, its rounded complete- 
ness, to that of Washington, or fail to mark 
what influence the hfe of Washington had on 
the life of Lee. The stamp appears upon it 
from his boyhood and grows more plain as 
his years progress. 

Just when the youth definitely set before him- 
self the character of Washington we may not 
know; but it must have been at an early date. 
The famous story of the sturdy little lad and 
the cherry tree must have been well known to 
young Lee from his earliest boyhood, for it was 
floating about that region when Parson Weems 
came across it as a neighborhood tradition, and 
made it a part of our literature.* It has be- 
come the fashion to deride such anecdotes; but 
this much, at least, may be said of this story, that 
however it may rest solely on the authority of 
the simple itinerant preacher, it is absolutely 
characteristic of Washington, and it is equally 

* A Japanese ofl&cer, a military attache at Washington, related 
to the writer that when he was a boy in a hill-town of Japan where 
his father was an officer of one of the old Samurai, his mother told 
him the story of George Washington and the cherry tree and tried 
to impress on him the lessons of truth. 



10 ROBERT E. LEE 

characteristic of him who since his time most 
nearly resembled him. 

However this was, the lad grew up amid the 
traditions of that greatest of great men, whose 
life he so manifestly takes as his model, and with 
whose fame his own fame was to be so closely 
allied in the minds and hearts of the people of 
the South. 

Like Washington, Robert E. Lee became an 
orphan at an early age, his father dying when the 
lad was only eleven years old, and, like Washing- 
ton, he was brought up by a devoted mother, the 
gentle and pious Anne Carter of Shirley, a rep- 
resentative, as already stated, of one of the old 
families of Tidewater Virginia and a descend- 
ant of Robert Carter, known as " King Car- 
ter," equally because of his great possessions, 
his dominant character, and his high position 
in the Colony. Through his mother, as through 
his father, Lee was related to most of the fami- 
lies of distinction in the Old Dominion, and, 
by at least one strain of blood, to Washington 
himself. To his mother he was ever a dutiful 
and devoted son and we have a glimpse of him, 
none the less interesting and significant because 
it is casual, leaving his playfellows to go and 
take his invalid mother driving in the old fam- 
ily carriage, where he was careful to fasten the 



EARLY LIFE ii 

curtains and close up the cracks with news- 
papers to keep the draughts from her. 

Early in his hfe his father and mother moved 
from Stratford to Alexandria, one of the two or 
three Virginia towns that were homes of the 
gentry, and his boyhood was passed in the old 
town that was redolent of the memory of Wash- 
ington. He worshipped in the same church in 
which Washington had been a pew-holder, and 
was a frequent visitor both at the noble mansion 
where the Father of his Country had made his 
home and at that where lived the Custises, the 
descendants and representatives of his adopted 
son. 

Sprung from such stock and nurtured on such 
traditions, the lad soon gave evidence of the char- 
acter that was to place him next to his model. 
"He was always a good boy," said his father. 
"You have been both son and daughter to me," 
wrote his mother, in her loneliness, after he had 
left home for West Point. "The other boys 
used to drink from the glasses of the gentlemen," 
said one of the family; "but Robert never 
would join them. He was different." 

A light is thrown on his character at this time 
in a pleasant reference to his boyhood made 
by himself long afterwards in writing of his 
youngest son, then a lad. ^*A young gentle- 



12 ROBERT E. LEE 

man," he says, "who has read Virgil must surely 
be competent to take care of two ladies; for 
before I had advanced that far I was my 
mother's outdoor agent and confidential mes- 
senger. * 

* Letter of June 25, 1857. 



CHAPTER II 

FIRST SERVICE 

u^VT'OUNG LEE selected at an early age the 
^ military profession, which had given his 

father and his great prototype their fame. It 
. was the profession to which all young men of 
5 spirit turned. It was in the blood. And young 
i. Lee was the son of him of whom General Greene 
-^ had said that "he became a soldier from his 
J mother's womb," a bit of characterization 
. which this soldier's distinguished son was to 
: quote with filial satisfaction when, after he 
i^ himself had become possibly the most famous 
^ soldier of his time, he wrote his father's biog- 
raphy. At the proper time, 1825, when he was 
eighteen years of age, he was entered as a cadet 
^ among Virginia's representatives at the military 
■^ academy of the country, having received his 
appointment from Andrew Jackson, to whom 
he applied in person. And there is a tradition 
that the hero of New Orleans was much im- 
pressed at the interview between them with the 
frank and sturdy youth who applied for the 



h^^/i 



^"i"*^ vm^^t.^ 




14 ROBERT E. LEE 

appointment. At the academy, as in the case 
of young Bonaparte, those soldierly qualities 
which were to bring him later so great a meas- 
ure of fame were apparent from the first; and 
he bore off the highest honor that a cadet can 
secure: the coveted cadet-adjutancy of the 
corps. Here, too, he gave evidence of the char- 
acter that was to prove his most distinguished 
attribute, and he graduated second in his class 
of forty-six; but with the extraordinary dis- 
tinction of not having received a demerit. Thus 
early his solid character manifested itself. 
"Even at West Point," says Holcombe, "the 
solid and lofty qualities of the young cadet were 
remarked on as bearing a resemblance to those 
of Washington." 

The impress of his character was already be- 
coming stamped upon his countenance. One 
who knew him about this time, records that as 
she observed his face in repose while he read to | 
the assembled family circle or sat in church, the 
reflection crossed her mind that he looked more 
like a great man than any one she had ever seen. 

Among his classmates and fellow students at 
West Point were many of those men whom he 
was afterwards to serve with or against in the i 
great Civil War, and doubtless a part of his i 
extraordinary success in that Homeric contest 



FIRST SERVICE 15 

was due to the accurate gauge which he formed 
in his youth or a Httle later in Mexico of their 
abihties and character. Indeed, as may be 
shown, this was made almost plainly manifest 
in his dealings in, at least, three great campaigns 
of the war: that in which he confronted the 
overprudent McClellan and defeated him, and 
those in which he balked the vainglorious Pope 
and Hooker. 

Here is a picture of him at this time, from the 
pen of one who knew and loved him all his life and 
had cause to know and love him as a true friend 
and faithful comrade : his old class mate and com- 
rade in arms, Joseph E. Johnston. They had, as 
he states, entered the Military Academy together 
as classmates and formed there a friendship never 
impaired, a friendship that was hereditary, as 
Johnston's father had served under Lee's father in 
the celebrated Lee Legion during the Revolutionary 
War. 

"We had," says General Johnston, "the 
same intimate associates, who thought as I did, 
that no other youth or man so united the quali- 
ties that win warm friendship and command 
high respect. For he was full of sympathy and 
kindness, genial and fond of gay conversation, 
and even of fun, while his correctness of de- 
meanor and attention to all duties, personal 



i6 ROBERT E. LEE 

and official, and a dignity as much a part of 
himself as the elegance of his person, gave him 
a superiority that every one acknowledged in 
his heart. He was the only one of all the men 
I have known that could laugh at the faults and 
follies of his friends in such a manner as to 
make them ashamed without touching their 
affection for him, and to confirm their respect 
and sense of his superiority." He mentions as 
an instance of the depth of his sympathy an 
occurrence which took place the morning after 
a battle in Mexico in which he had lost a cher- 
ished young relative. Lee, meeting him and 
seeing the grief in his face, burst into tears and 
soothed him with a sympathy as tender, declared 
the veteran long years after, " as his lovely wife 
would have done." 

Small wonder that the soldiers who followed 
Lee faced death with a devotion that was well- 
nigh without a parallel. 

Still influenced in part, perhaps, by his worship 
for his great hero, the young officer chose as the 
partner of his life, his old playmate, Miss Mary 
Parke Custis, the granddaughter of Washing- 
ton's step-son, the surviving representative of 
Washington. Mrs. Lee was the daughter and 
heiress of George W. Parke Custis, while Lieu- 
tenant Lee was poor; but such was her pride in 



FIRST SERVICE 17 

her husband and her sense of what was his due 
that on her marriage to him she determined to 
live on her husband's income as a lieutenant, 
and for some time she thus lived.* It was a 
fitting training for the hardships she was called 
on to face when her husband as Commander- 
in-Chief of the Confederate Armies, deemed him- 
self happy to be able to send her one nearly dried 
up lemon. Their domestic life was one of ideal 
devotion and happiness. Should we seek through 
all the annals of time for an illustration of the 
best that exists in family life, we need not go 
further to find the perfection and refinement of 
elegance and of purity, than that stately man- 
sion, the home of Lee, which from the wooded 
heights of Arlington looks down upon the city of 
Washington; and has by a strange fate, become 
the last resting-place of many of those whose 
chief renown has been that they fought bravely 
against Lee. 

With the distinction of such a high gradu- 
ation as his, young Lee was, of course, assigned 
to the Engineers, that corps of intellectual aris- 
tocracy from which came, with the notable 
exceptions of Grant and Jackson, nearly all the 
officers who attained high rank during the war. 

* This fact was stated to the writer by the wife of General 
Wm. N. Pendleton, Mrs. Lee's close neighbor and friend. 



i8 ROBERT E. LEE 

His first service was in Virginia, and he was 
stationed at Fortress Monroe when occurred in 
a neighboring county the bloody negro-uprising 
known as the "Nat Turner RebelHon," which 
thrilled Virginia as thirty years later thrilled 
her the yet more perilous "John Brown Raid" 
which Lee was sent to quell, and quelled. Lee's- 
letters to his wife touching this episode, while 
self-contained as was his wont, show the deep 
gravity with which he regarded this bloody 
outbreak. 

His early manhood was devoted to his pro- 
fession, wherein he made, while still a young 
man, a reputation for ability of so high an order, 
and for such devotion to duty, that when the 
Mississippi, owing to a gradual change in its 
banks, threatened the city of St. Louis, General 
Scott, having been appealed to to lend his aid 
to prevent so dire a calamity, said he knew of 
but one man who was equal to the task. Brevet 
Captain Lee. "He is young," he wrote, "but 
if the work can be done, he can do it." The 
city government, it is said, impatient at the young 
engineer's methodical way, withdrew the appro- 
priation for the work; but he went on quietly, 
with the comment, "They can do as they like 
with their own, but I was sent here to do certain 
work and I shall do it." And he did it. Feel- 



1 



FIRST SERVICE 19 

ing in the city ran high, riots broke out, 
and it is said that cannon were placed in po- 
sition to fire on his working force; but he kept 
calmly on to the end. The work he wrought 
there stands to-day — the bulwark of the great 
city which has so recently invited America and 
the nations of the world within her gates. 

The Mexican War was the training-ground of 
most of those who fought with distinction in 
the later and more terrible strife of the Civil 
War, and many of the greatest campaigns and 
fiercest battles of that war were planned and 
fought with a science learned upon the pampas 
and amid the mountains of Mexico. During the 
Mexican War, Lee, starting in as an engineer 
officer on the staff of General Wool, achieved 
more renown than any other soldier of his rank, 
and possibly more than any other officer in the 
army of invasion, except the commander-in-chief. 

The scope of this volume will not admit of 
going into the details of his distinguished services 
there which kept him ever at the crucial point and 
which led General Scott to declare long after- 
wards that he was the "very best soldier he ever 
saw in the field." His scouts and reconnaissances 
at Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, and 
Chapultepec, brought him the brevets of Major 
at Cerro Gordo, April 18, 1874, of Lieutenant- 

v7 



20 ROBERT E. LEE 

Colonel at Contreras and Churubusco, and 
of Colonel at Chapultepec, September 13th. 
His first marked distinction was won by a 
reconnaissance made at night with a single guide, 
whom he compelled to serve at the muzzle of 
the pistol, wherein he ascertained the falsity of 
a report that Santa Anna's army had crossed 
the mountains and lay in their front. This dis- 
tinction he greatly increased by work at Vera 
Cruz, by which that strategic point, protected, 
as was believed, by impregnable defences, was 
captured. But this, as notable as it was, was 
as far excelled by his services at Cerro Gordo as 
that was in turn by his work at Contreras. At 
Cerro Gordo, where Santa Anna with 13,000 
troops and forty-two guns posted in a pass 
barred the way in an apparently impregnable 
position, Lee discovered a mountain pass, and 
having in person led Twigg's division to the 
point for assault in front, and having worked 
all night posting batteries, at dawn next morn- 
ing led Riley's brigade up the mountains in the 
turning movement which forced Santa Anna 
from his stronghold. At Contreras again, he 
showed the divinely given endowments on which 
his future fame was to rest. 

At Contreras the army of invasion found 
itself in danger of being balked almost at the 



FIRST SERVICE 21 

Gates of the Capital, and Lee's ability shone 
forth even more briUiantly than at Cerro Gordo. 
The defences of the City of Mexico on the east- 
ward appeared impregnable, while an attack 
from the south, where the approach was natu- 
rally less difficult, was rendered apparently 
almost as unassailable by powerful batteries 
constructed at San Antonio Hill commanding 
the only avenue of approach, the road which 
wound between Lake Chalco with its deep mo- 
rass on one side, and impassable lava beds on 
the other. Lee by careful reconnaissance dis- 
covered a mule-trail over the Pedregal, as this 
wild and broken tract of petrified lava was 
termed, and this trail having been opened suf- 
ficiently to admit of the passage of troops, though 
with difficulty and danger, he conducted over 
it the commands of Generals Pillow and Worth, 
and the village of Contreras was seized and held 
till night against all assaults of the enemy. The 
position of the American troops, however, was 
one of extreme peril, as it was known that heavy 
reinforcements were being rushed forward by 
the Mexicans, and at a council of war it was de- 
cided to advance before dawn rather than await 
attack from the Mexican forces. It became 
necessary to inform General Scott of the situa- 
tion and Captain Lee volunteered for the per- 



22 ROBERT E. LEE 

ilous service. He accordingly set out in the 
darkness and alone, and in the midst of a furi- 
ous tropical storm, he made his way back 
across the lava beds infested by bands of Mexi- 
cans, advised the Commander-in-Chief of the 
proposed movement, and having secured his 
co-operation, returned across the Pedregal in 
time to assist in the assault which forced the 
Mexicans to abandon their position, and opened 
the way to Churubusco, Molino del Rey and 
Chapultepec, and, finally, led to the occupation 
of the capital and the close of the War. 

This was, declared Scott, "The greatest feat 
of physical and moral courage performed by 
any individual, to my knowledge, pending the 
campaign.'* 

The "gallantry and good conduct," the "in- 
valuable services," "the intrepid coolness and 
gallantry of Captain Lee of the Engineers," of 
"Captain Lee, so constantly distinguished," fill 
all the dispatches of all the battles of the war, 
and Lee came out of this war with such a rep- 
utation for ability that his old commander, 
Scott, declared to General Preston, that he was 
"the greatest Hving soldier in America." In- 
deed, Scott, with prescient vision, declared his 
opinion that he was "the greatest soldier now 
living in the world." " If I were on my death- 



FIRST SERVICE 23 

bed to-morrow," he said to General Preston, 
long before the breaking out of the war, "and 
the President of the United States should tell me 
that a great battle were to be fought for the 
liberty or slavery of the country, and asked my 
judgment as to the ability of a commander, I 
would say with my dying breath, *Let it be 
Robert E. Lee/" 

Lee, himself, however, declared that it was 
General Scott's stout heart and military skill 
which overcame all obstacles and while others 
croaked pushed the campaign through to final 
success. 

During the period following the Mexican 
War, Lee was engaged for a time in constructing 
the defences of Baltimore. Then he was, in 
1852, assigned to duty as Superintendent of the 
United States Military Academy at West Point, 
and three years later was assigned to active duty 
on the southwestern frontier as Lieutenant 
Colonel of one of the two regiments of cavalry 
which Mr. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of 
War, had organized on the recommendation 
of General Scott and made a separate branch 
of the service.* He soon rose to the rank of 

* Of these regiments E. V. Sumner was Colonel of the first and 
Joseph E. Johnston was Lieutenant-Colonel, and Albert Sydney 
Johnston was Colonel of the second, with Lee as his Lieutenant- 
Colonel. 



24 ROBERT E. LEE 

colonel of cavalry, a position which a great critic 
of war has asserted to be the best of all training 
schools for a great captain, and he held this rank 
when, having been brought to Washington to 
revise the tactics of the army, he was unexpect- 
edly called on in the summer of 1859 to take 
charge of the force of marines sent to Harper's 
Ferry to capture John Brown and his followers 
in their crazy and murderous invasion of Vir- 
ginia, with the design of starting a servile war 
which should lead to the negroes achieving their 
emancipation. This duty he performed prompt- 
ly and efficiently. 

Long afterwards when he was a defeated 
general on parole, without means, his every act 
and word watched by enemies thirsting for his 
blood, one of the men he had commanded in 
the 2d Cavalry, but who had fought in the Un- 
ion army throughout the war, called at his house 
in Richmond with a basket of provisions for his 
old commander, and when he saw him seized 
him in his arms and kissed him. 

A light is thrown on his character in the letters 
he wrote about and to his children during his long 
absences from home on duty in the West and in 
Mexico. And it is one of the pathetic elements in 
the history of this loving and tender father, that 
with a nature which would have reveled in the 



FIRST SERVICE 25 

joys of domestic life, he should have been called 
by duty to spend so large a part of his time away 
from home that he did not even know his young- 
est son when he met him. He was ever devoted 
to children, and amid the most tragic scenes of his 
eventful life, his love for them speaks from his 
letters. Writing to his wife from St. Louis in 
1837, when he was engaged in engineering work 
for the government, he speaks with deep feeling 
of the sadness he felt at being separated from his 
family, and of his anxiety about the training of 
his little son. "Our dear little boy," he says, 
"seems to have among his friends the reputa- 
tion of being hard to manage — a distinction not 
at all desirable, as it indicates self-will and ob- 
stinacy. Perhaps, these are qualities which he 
really possesses, and he may have a better right 
to them than I am willing to acknowledge; but 
it is our duty, if possible, to counteract them, 
and assist him to bring them under his control. 
I have endeavored, in my intercourse with him, 
to require nothing but what was, in my opinion, 
necessary or proper, and to explain to him tem- 
perately its propriety, and at a time when he 
could listen to my arguments and not at the 
moment of his being vexed and his little faculties 
warped by passion. I have also tried to show 
him that I was firm in my demands and con- 



26 ROBERT E. LEE 

stant in their enforcement and that he must 
comply with them, and I let him see that I look 
to their execution in order to relieve him as 
much as possible from the temptation to break 
them." 

Wise words from a father, and the significant 
thing was that they represented his conduct 
throughout his life. He was the personification of 
reasonableness. Small wonder that his youngest 
son, in his memoir of his father, recorded that 
among his first impressions was the recognition of 
a difference between his father and other persons, 
and a knowledge that he had to be obeyed. A 
touch in one of his letters to an old friend and 
classmate, then Lieutenant, afterwards Lieutenant 
General Joseph E. Johnston, gives a glimpse of 
his love for children, and also of that of another 
old friend: "He complains bitterly of his 
present waste of life, looks thin and dispirited 
and is acquainted with the cry of every child in 
Iowa." 

His son and namesake in his "Recollections'* 
of his father makes mention of many little in- 
stances of his love of and care for animals, and 
the same love of and care for animals constantly 
shines from his letters. 

At one time he picked up a dog lost and 
swimming wildly in "the Narrows" and cared 



FIRST SERVICE 27 

for it through Hfe; at another he takes a long, 
roundabout journey by steamer for the sake of 
his horse; at another he writes, "Cannot you 
cure poor 'Spec' ?" (his dog). "Cheer him up! 
take him to walk with you — tell the children to 
cheer him up." In fact, his love for animals, 
like his love for children, was a marked char- 
acteristic throughout his life, and long after the 
war he took the trouble to write a description of 
his horse "Traveller," which none but a true 
lover of horses could have written. 

On his return from Mexico, after an absence 
so long that he failed to recognize his own child 
whom he had left a babe in arms, he was, like 
Ulysses, first recognized by his faithful dog.* 

His two elder sons had both entered the mili- 
tary profession, which their father held in the 
highest honor, and the letters he wrote them 
illustrated not only the charming relation that 
existed between father and sons, but the lofty 
ideal on which he ever modeled his own life and 
desired that they should model theirs. To his 
oldest son, then a cadet at West Point, he writes 
from Arlington (April 5, 1852), as he was on 
the point of leaving for New Mexico to see that 
his "fine old regiment" which had been "or- 
dered to that distant region" was "properly 

* " Recollections and Letters of General Lee. By R. E. Lee. 



28 ROBERT E. LEE 

cared for": . . . "Your letters breathe a true 
spirit of frankness; they have given myself and 
your mother great pleasure. You must study 
to be frank with the v^orld. Frankness is the 
child of honesty and courage. . . . Never do 
a wrong thing to make a friend or to keep one. 
. . . Above all, do not appear to others what 
you are not. ... In regard to duty, let me in 
conclusion of this hasty letter inform you that 
nearly a hundred years ago there was a day of 
remarkable darkness and gloom, still known as 
the dark day — a day when the light of the sun 
was slowly extinguished, as if by an eclipse. 
The legislature of Connecticut was in session, 
and, as its members saw the unexpected and un- 
accountable darkness coming on, they shared the 
general awe and terror. It was supposed by 
many that the last day — the day of judgment 
had come. Some one in consternation of the 
hour moved an adjournment. Then there arose 
an old Pilgrim legislator, Davenport of Stam- 
ford, and said that if the last day had come he 
desired to be found at his place doing his duty, 
and therefore moved that candles be brought in 
so that the House could proceed with its duty. 
There was quietness in that man's mind, the 
quietness of heavenly wisdom and inflexible will- 
ingness to obey present duty. Duty, then, is the 



FIRST SERVICE 



29 



sublimest word in our language. Do your duty 
in all things, like the old Puritan. You cannot 
do more; you should never wish to do less. 
Never let me or your mother wear one gray hair 
for lack of duty on your part." * 

* It is said that this letter as a whole was made up by a clever 
newspaper man out of parts of different letters by Lee. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 

TTT'HEN the war came Lee had to face the most 
momentous question that ever confronted 
a soldier. The Government of the United States 
and his own State, which was later to form a part 
of a new National Government, were about to 
be arrayed in arms against each other. The 
former was preparing to invade his native State 
to coerce by arms the seceded States. He had to 
decide between allegiance to the general Govern- 
ment whose commission he had borne, whose 
honors had been conferred on him, and under 
whose flag he had won high distinction; and alle- 
giance to his native State, which had been a con- 
stituent part of that government, and which in 
the exercise of its Constitutional right, seceded 
from the Union on being invaded. 

The John Brown Raid with its aim, the head- 
ing of a servile insurrection throughout the 
South, backed as it was by blind enthusiasts at 
the North, affected profoundly all thinking men 
at the South. Had it proved successful, the 

30 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 31 

horrors of San Domingo would have been mul- 
tipHed a thousandfold and have swept over the 
South in a deluge of blood. The South was 
enraged by this effort to arouse a slave-insur- 
rection; but the wild sympathy expressed at 
the North with its murderous leader gave it a 
shock from which it never recovered. Lee had 
no illusions respecting slavery. He saw its evils 
with an eye as clear as Wendell Phillips'. He 
set forth his views in favor of emancipation in 
as positive terms as Lincoln ever employed. He 
manumitted all the slaves he owned in his own 
right before the war, and within a week after 
the emancipation proclamation he manumitted 
all the negroes received by him from the Custis 
estate, having previous to that time made his 
arrangements to. do so in conformity with the 
provisions of Mr. Custis's will. 

Most men of open minds have long passed 
the point when we should deny to any honorable 
man the right to make that election as his con- 
science dictated. But with most of us sympathy 
and affection go to the man who chose the 
weaker side. This choice Lee deliberately 
made. Who knows what agony that accom- 
plished soldier and ftoble gentleman went 
through during those long weeks, when the 
sword was suspended and he with unblinded 



32 ROBERT E. LEE 

vision foresaw that it must fall. To some men 
the decision might have been made more diffi- 
cult by the prize that was suddenly held out to 
him. But not so with Lee. The only question 
with him was what was his duty. 

The President of the United States tendered 
to him the command of the armies of the Union 
about to take the field. This has long been re- 
garded by those who know as an established 
fact; but it has become the custom of late 
among a certain class to deny the fact on the 
principle, perhaps, that an untruth well stuck to 
may possibly supplant the truth. Of the fact that 
he was offered the command of the armies of the 
United States there is, however, abundant proof 
outside of General Lee*s own statement to Sena- 
tor Reverdy Johnson, were more proof needed. 
The Hon. Montgomery Blair published the 
fact as stated by his father, the Hon. Francis 
P. Blair, that he had been sent by Mr. Lincoln to 
Colonel Lee with the offer of the command, and 
long afterwards the Hon. Simon Cameron, for- 
merly Secretary of War in Mr. Lincoln's cabi- 
net, in a published interview, frankly admitted 
the fact. "It is true," he says, "that Gen. Rob- 
ert E. Lee was tendered the command of the 
Union Army. It was the wish of Mr. Lincoln's 
administration that as many as possible of the 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 33 

southern officers then in the regular army should 
remain true to the nation which had educated 
them. Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston 
were then the leading southern soldiers. . . . 
In the moves and counter moves in the game of 
war and peace then going on, Francis P. Blair, 
Sr., was a prominent figure. The tender of the 
command of the U. S. forces was made to Gen- 
eral Lee through him. Mr. Blair came to me 
expres,sing the opinion that General Lee could 
be held to our cause by the offer of the chief 
command of our forces. I authorized Mr. Blair 
to make the offer. . . ." * 

But the matter is set at rest by a letter from 
General Lee — his letter of February 25, 1868, 
to Reverdy Johnston — in which he states that 
he had a conversation with Mr. Francis 
Preston Blair, at his invitation, and as he un- 
derstood at the instance of President Lincoln. 
"After listening to his remarks," he says, "I 
declined the offer he made me to take com- 
mand of the army that was to be brought into 
the field, stating as candidly and as courteously 
as I could that, though opposed to Secession 
and deprecating War, I could take no part in 
an invasion of the Southern States. I went di- 
rectly from the interview with Mr. Blair to the 

* New York Herald, cited Jones's " Lee," p. 130. 



34 ROBERT E. LEE 

office of General Scott, told him of the proposi- 
tion that had been made me and my decision." * 
Indeed, it was this offer which possibly hastened 
his decision. 

Two days later, on April 20th, he resigned 
his commission in the United States Army, de- 
claring that he never wished to draw his sword 
again save in defence of his native State. Even 
then he "hoped that Peace might be preserved 
and some way found to save the country from 
the calamities of War." 

So much we have from his own lips, and that is 
proof enough for those who know his character. 

This action of Lee's at the outbreak of the 
war, in resigning from the Army of the United 
States, and later in assuming the command, first 
of the Virginia forces, and afterwards of the 
Confederate forces, used, during the period of 
passion covered by the war and the bitter years 
which followed, to be made the basis of a criti- 
cism whose rancor bore an almost precise re- 
lation to the degree of security which had been 
sought by the assailant during the hour of danger. 
The men who fought' the battles of the Union 
said little upon the subject. They knew for 
the most part the feeling which animated the 

*See also Jones's "Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee," 
p. 128. 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 35 

breasts which opposed them, and paid it the 
tribute of unfeigned respect. The conduct of 
Grant and of his officers at Appomattox, with 
a single exception, was such as to reflect un- 
ending credit on them as men of honour and 
generosity. The charge of treason was mainly 
left to those who, having risked nothing on the 
field of honour, were fain later, when all danger 
was past, to achieve a reputation for patriotism 
by the fury of their cries for revenge. To these, 
the vultures of the race, may be added an 
element, sincere and not well-informed, who 
more than half wishing to avail themselves 
of Lee's transcendent character, have found his 
action in this crisis a stumbling-block in their 
way. Having been reared solely upon the doc- 
trine of Federalism, and taught all their lives 
that the officers of the Army of the Union had 
received their education at West Point at the 
hands of the National Government and were 
guilty of something like treason, or, as it used to 
be put, treachery, in giving up their commands 
in the Union Army and hearing arms for their 
States against the United States, they find it 
difficult to accept the plainest facts. These are 
the bigots of Politics. 

As the statement is wholly unfounded and as 
the matter goes to the basis of character, it is 



36 ROBERT E. LEE 

well to point these latter to the facts which dis- 
prove wholly and forever the premises on which 
they have based their erroneous conclusion. 

It is well to remember at the outset that in the 
first place, the action of every man must be con- 
sidered in relation to the conditions from which 
that action springs, and amid which it had its 
being. The most fallacious method of consid- 
ering history is that which excludes contem- 
porary conditions and undertakes to judge it by 
the present, the two eras often being far more 
different than would be indicated by the mere 
passage of time. 

At the time when these officers received their 
education at the Military Academy, they were 
sent there as State cadets, and the expense of 
their education was borne at last by the several 
States, which, there being at that time no high 
tariff and no internal revenue taxation to main- 
tain the National Government, made a yet more 
direct contribution than since the war to the 
Government for its expenses. In recognition 
of this fact and as compensation for the contri- 
bution by the States, each Representative of a 
State had the right to send a cadet to each 
academy. Virginia had been peculiarly instru- 
mental in creating the Union. She had taken 
a foremost and decisive part in the Revolution 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 37 

for those rights on which the Constitution was 
based and subsequently in the adoption of the 
Constitution. She had led ahke in the field 
and in the Council Chamber. Without her no 
Union would have been formed, and without 
her no Union would have been preserved during 
the early decades of its existence. To make the 
Union possible she had ceded her vast north- 
west territory, first embraced in her charter, 
and later conquered by her sons led by George 
Rogers Clark. 

There had long been two different schools of 
governmental thought in the country, the one 
representing the Federalist Party, and the other 
representing the Republican or Democratic 
Party. They had their rise in the very incep- 
tion of the National Government. Their teach- 
ings had divided the country from that time on. 
Originally the chief agitation against the Federal 
Government had been at the North, and while 
the parties were not demarked by any sectional 
lines, for the most part, the body of the Federalist 
Party were at the period of the outbreak of war, 
owing to certain conditions connected with the 
institution of slavery, and to various advantages 
accruing to the Northern States, as manufactur- 
ing States, at the North, while the body of the 
States' rights party were at the South. Not only 



38 ROBERT E. LEE 

were the powers of the greatest statesmen and 
debaters in the country continually exercised up- 
on this question, as for example, in the great 
debates in which Clay, Webster, Hayne, and 
Calhoun took part on the floor of the Senate, 
but the teachings in the great institutions of 
learning were divided.* 

But Lee had from his boyhood been reared 
in the Southern school of States' Rights as in- 
terpreted by the conservative statesmen of Vir- 
ginia. His gallant and distinguished father had 
been governor of Virginia, and, while heartily 
advocating in the Virginia Convention the rati- 
fication of the Constitution of the United States, 
favored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 
of 1798-99, drawn by Mr. Madison and Mr. Jef- 
ferson, which were based upon the States' 
Rights doctrine. He said in debate, "Virginia 
is my country, her will I obey, however lament- 
able the fate to which it may subject me." 

He wrote to Mr. Madison in January, 1792, a 
letter in which he said, "No consideration on 
earth could induce me to act a part, however 
gratifying to me, which could be construed into 
disregard of, or faithlessness to, this Common- 
wealth." 

* A brief and simple statement of the position of the two sides 
may be found in Ropes's "Story of The Civil War": I. Chap. i. 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 39 

Such was the teaching under which Robert E. 
Lee had been reared. One knows Httle of Vir- 
ginia who does not know in what passionate 
esteem the traditions and opinions of a father 
were cherished by a son. Political views were 
as much inherited as religious tenets. 

As a matter of fact, at the time that young Lee 
was attending the Military Academy at West 
Point, the text-books, such as "Rawle on the 
Constitution," which were used there, taught 
with great distinctness the absolute right of a 
State to secede, and the primary duty of every 
man to his native State.* " It depends on the 
State itself," declares this authority then taught 
at West Point, "to retain or abolish the prin- 
ciple of representation, because it depends on 
itself whether it will continue a member of the 
Union." This position was that held by the 
leaders of New England during the first half of the 

* This has been ably and conclusively shown by Mr. Charles 
Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, in his admirable address on 
"Constitutional Ethics," and in his memorial address on the life 
and character of Robert E. Lee, delivered at Washington and Lee 
University on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of Gen- 
eral Lee's birth. His distinguished grandfather, John Quincy 
Adams, who had been President of the United States, had enun- 
ciated the doctrine of Secession clearly, declaring that it would 
be better for the States to " part in friendship from each other 
than to be held together by constraint " and " to form again a 
more perfect Union by dissolving that which could not bind." 
— Speech of John Quincy Adams, April 30, 1839. 



40 ROBERT E. LEE 

century, and was earnestly advanced both at the 
time of the acquisition of Louisiana and of Texas. 

The action of the Hartford Convention in 
threatening secession had blazoned abroad the 
views of the leaders of New England thought 
at the time when the Virginians were straining 
every force to maintain the Union; and John 
Quincy Adams had presented to Congress (Jan- 
uary 23, 1842) a petition from a Massachusetts 
town (Haverhill), asking the dissolution of the 
Union, on which a motion had been made by a 
Virginia member (Mr. Gilmer), to censure him, 
which had been debated for ten days, Mr. 
Adams ably defending himself. 

Indeed, whatever question existed as to the 
right of a State to secede, there was no ques- 
tion whatever as to her citizens being bound 
by her action should she secede. The basic 
principle of the Anglo-Saxon Civilization was 
the defence of the inner circle against whatever 
assailed it from the outside, and nowhere was 
this principle more absolutely established than 
in Virginia. 

In a thoughtful discussion of the action of Vir- 
ginia at this time, Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, 
the noted biographer of Stonewall Jackson, says, 
"There can be no question but that secession 
was Revolution, and Revolutions, as has been 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 41 

well said, are not made for the sake of 'greased 
cartridges.' . . . Secession, in fact, was a pro- 
test against mob rule. ... It is always difficult 
to analyse the motives of those by whom revo- 
lution is provoked; but if a whole people acqui- 
esce, it is a certain proof of the existence of 
universal apprehension and deep-rooted discon- 
tent. This spirit of self-sacrifice which ani- 
mated the Confederate South has been char- 
acteristic of every revolution which has been 
the expression of a nation's wrongs, but it has 
never yet accompanied mere factious insurrec- 
tion. When, in the process of time, the history 
of secession comes to be viewed with the same 
freedom from prejudice as the history of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it will be 
clear that the fourth great revolution of the 
English speaking race differs in no essential 
characteristic from those that preceded it. . . . 
In each a great principle was at stake: in 1642 
the liberty of the subject; in 1688, the integrity 
of the Protestant faith; in 1775, taxation only 
with consent of the taxed; in 1861, the sov- 
ereignty of the individual states." * 

♦Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson." New Impression. I. 

PP- 93-4. 

I have quoted extensively in this volume from this author, 
feeling that he, as an impartial student of the Civil War and its 
causes, is an authority to command respect. 



42 ROBERT E. LEE 

Whether, then, those who were in the service 
of the United States at the outbreak of the war 
were under obhgation to remain in her service 
after the States seceded, or were under obhga- 
tion to resign and espouse the side of their sev- 
eral States, was a matter for each man to decide 
according to his conscience, and scores of gal- 
lant and high-minded gentlemen thus decided. 
Of the three hundred and odd graduates of 
West Point who were from the South, at least 
nine-tenths followed their States, and these, 
men whose character would challenge com- 
parison with the loftiest examples of the human 
race. That there was an obligation on them to 
remain, because of the source from which their 
education came, is sheer nonsense. This edu- 
cation was but a simple return for the money 
contributed by their States to the General Gov- 
ernment. And Virginia had paid for all she 
got, a hundred times over. 

When the great conflict came, the time which 
tried men's souls, no soul in all the limits of this 
broad country was more tried than that lofty 
soul which had for its home the breast of Robert 
E. Lee. A glimpse of his love for and pride in 
his country may be found in a letter written 
during his stay in Texas in 1856. Writing to his 
wife of the Fourth of July, he says, "Mine was 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 43 

spent after a march of thirty miles, on one of 
the branches of the Brazos, under my blanket, 
elevated on four sticks driven in the ground, as 
a sunshade. The sun was fiery hot, the atmos- 
phere like a blast from a hot-air furnace, the 
water salt, still my feelings for my country were 
as ardent, my faith in her future as true, and my 
hope for her advancement as unabated as they 
would have been under better circumstances." * 

Such was the feeling of this Virginian for his 
country. 

Writing of secession, from Texas in the begin- 
ning of 1861, he said, "The South, in my opin- 
ion, has been aggrieved by the act of the North. 
I feel the aggression and am willing to take 
every proper step for redress. It is the principle 
I contend for, not individual or private interest. 
As an American citizen I take great pride in 
my country, her prosperity and institutions. 
But I can anticipate no greater calamity for this 
country than a dissolution of the Union. It 
would be an accumulation of all the evils we 
complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice every- 
thing but honor for its preservation. I hope, 
therefore, that all constitutional means will be 
exhausted before there is a resort to force. Se- 
cession is nothing but revolution. . . . Still a 

* Letter of August 4th, 1856, cited in Jones's Lee, p. 80. 



44 ROBERT E. LEE 

Union that can only be maintained by swords 
and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war 
are to take the place of brotherly love and 
kindness, has no charm for me. I shall mourn 
for my country, and for the welfare and progress 
of mankind. If the Union is dissolved and the 
government disrupted, I shall return to my 
native state and share the miseries of my people, 
and, save in defence, will draw my sword no 
more.'' * 

The agonizing which he endured, when the 
crucial time came, may possibly never be known 
to us. All night nearly he paced his chamber 
floor alone, often seeking on his knees the 
guidance of the God he trusted in. But in 
the morning light had come.f His wife's fam- 
ily were strongly Union in their sentiments, and 
the writer has heard that powerful family in- 
fluences were exerted to prevail on him to 
adhere to the Union side. "My husband has 
wept tears of blood," wrote Mrs. Lee to his old 
commander, Scott, who did him the justice to 
declare that he knew he acted under a com- 
pelling sense of duty. 

His letters to his family and to his friends, 

* Letter of January 23, 1861. Cited in Jones's " Life and Letters 
of R. E. Lee," p. 120. 

t Jones's "Life and Letters of Robert E. Lee," p. 132. 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 45 

though self-restrained, as was the habit of the 
man, show plainly to those who knew his char- 
acter how stern was the sense of duty under 
which he acted when in his own person he had 
to meet the question whether he should take 
part against his native State. Unlike many 
other officers who knew no home but the post 
where they were quartered, Lee's home was in 
Virginia, and to this home in his most distant 
service his heart had ever yearned. 

Lee had no personal interests to subserve con- 
nected with the preservation of the institution of 
slavery; his inclinations and his views all tended 
the other way. " In this enlightened age," he had 
already written, "there are few, I believe, but will 
acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a 
moral and political evil." He had set free the 
slaves he owned in his own right and was " in favor 
of freeing all the slaves in the South, giving to 
each owner a bond to be the first paid by the Con- 
federacy when its independence should be se- 
cured."* 

The slaves owned by Mrs. Lee he manumitted 
in 1862 or in January, 1863. In fact, it is acuri- 

* " The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War," p. 22; 
OflEical Report of the History Committee, Grand Camp, C V., 
by the late Hunter McGuire, M.D*, LL.D., Richmond, Va. See 
also Lee's letter of December 27, 1856, "Life and Letters of 
Robert E. Lee "; Jones, p. 82. 



46 ROBERT E. LEE 

ous commentary on the motives connected with 
the war that while Lee had set his slaves free, 
Grant is said to have continued in the posses- 
sion of slaves until they were emancipated by the 
Government of the United States.* 

It was, however, not so much the freeing of 
these slaves as the compassion and affection that 
breathe in his letters about them that testify his 
character. His care that every one should have 
his papers even though he might have gone off to 
the North; his provision for their wages; his 
solicitude for the weak and feeble among them; 
all testify to the feeling that the Virginia master 
had for his servants. His thoughts were con- 
stantly with his children — even amid the most 
arduous duties and the most perilous scenes his 
mind reverted to them. His letters from Mexico 
were full of them. On Christmas eve he, in his 
imagination, filled their stockings, as on another 
occasion; in lieu of his own children, from whom 
he was far distant, he acted Santa Claus and 
bought presents for all the children in the post. 
He ever kept in touch with his children, writing 
them of the interesting scenes through which he 
passed. To his eldest son, then a schoolboy, later 

*Ibid., p. 23, note, where Mrs. Grant is given as authority, the 
statement that " these slaves came to him from my father's fam- 
ily; for I lived in the West when I married the General, who was 
then a Lieutenant in the Army." 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 47 

a gallant and efficient soldier of high rank, he 
wrote, just after the Battle of Cerro Gordo,* how, 
in the battle, he had wondered while the musket 
balls and grape were whistling over his head in a 
perfect shower, where he could have put him if with 
him, to be safe. Indeed, all through his life children 
had a charm for him known only to the starved 
heart of a father exiled from his own fireside and 
little ones. To the day of his death, the entrance 
of a child was a signal for the dignified soldier to 
unbend, and among his latest companions in his 
retirement, when he was, perhaps, the most noted 
Captain in the world, were the little sunbonneted 
daughters of the professors of the college of which 
he was the President. 

The crisis that came rent Virginia. It was 
known that in the event of war, should Virginia 
secede, her soil would become the battle ground. 
Lee had no illusion as to this; nor had he any 
illusion as to the fury and duration of the war 
if it should come. Whatever delusions others 
might cherish, he knew the Union thoroughly, 
and knew the temper and the mettle of the 
people of both sections. In the dread shadow of 
war the people of Virginia selected for the great 
convention, which was to decide the question of 
remaining in the Union or taking part with the 

* Letter of April 25, 1847. 



48 ROBERT E. LEE 

other Southern States, the most conservative 
men within her borders. Thus, the Virginia 
convention was a Whig body with a large ma- 
jority of staunch Union men, the first Whig 
body that ever sat in the State. 

Throughout its entire duration this great body 
of representative Virginians resisted all the in- 
fluences that were brought to bear on it, both 
from the South and from the people of the State, 
who, under unreasoning provocation, gradually 
changed their opinion and began to clamor for 
secession. Only two weeks before the final act 
by which she severed her connection with the 
Union, she, by a two-thirds majority, rejected 
the idea of secession. A relief squadron sailed 
for Charleston while negotiations were going on, 
and preparations for war were being pushed 
which could only mean one thing. As a last 
and supreme effort to prevent war. Union men 
went to Washington to beg Mr. Lincoln to 
withdraw the garrisons of Sumter and Pickens, 
and understood him to say that he had been 
willing to take it under favorable considera- 
tion.* The reply when it came was the im- 
perative call for troops to be furnished by the 
States. It meant war and the invasion of the 

* Report of Joint Committee on Reconstruction, ist Sess., 
39th Cong., pp. 71, 114-115- 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 49 

State. Even after Sumter was fired on, every 
effort v^as made by the State to bring about a 
reconciliation between the estranged and di- 
vided sections. But it was too late. Troops 
were already marching on her. The State did 
not make war. War was made on her. And 
under the shock Virginia, on the 17th day of 
April, solemnly reversed her former action and 
seceded from the Union she had done so much 
to create and so much to make great. 

"To have acceded to the demand (for her 
quota of troops to attack South Carolina) 
would," says Henderson, "have been to abjure 
the most cherished principles of her political 
existence. . . . Neutrality was impossible. She 
was bound to furnish her tale of troops and thus 
telie her principles, or to secede at once and 
reject with a clean conscience the President's 
mandate. . . . The world has long since done 
justice to the motives of Cromwell and of 
Washington, and signs are not wanting that 
before many years have passed it will do justice 
to the motives of the southern people." 

Speaking of Virginia's action specifically, he 
declares, "Her best endeavors were exerted to 
maintain the peace between the hostile sections, 
and not till her liberties were menaced did she 
repudiate a compact which had become intoler- 



50 ROBERT E. LEE 

able. It was to preserve the freedom which her 
forefathers had bequeathed her, and which she 
desired to hand down unsuUied to future genera- 
tions, that she acquiesced in the revolution."* 

" I can contemplate no greater calamity for 
the country than a dissolution of the Union," 
wrote Lee in January. In April the calamity had 
come. Virginia had been invaded and had 
risen to repel the invasion. The Union was 
dissolved in so far as his State was concerned. 

Her action concluded her citizens. This was 
Lee's view, and it was the view of every man 
who sat in her Convention, Unionist and Seces- 
sionist. Ninety-nine out of every hundred of 
the intelligent men in what was known as Old 
Virginia, the great section east of the Allegha- 
nies which had largely made her history, bowed 
to her decree and not with the less unanimity 
that a considerable element among them were 
grief-stricken at her decision to separate from 
the Union which their fathers had done so 
much to create. t 

Among these was Robert E. Lee. Before him 

* Henderson's " Life of Stonewall Jackson." I. pp. 101-2. 

t The writer's father was a staunch Union man, and stood out 
against secession till the last; but three days after Virginia seceded 
he enlisted as a private in an infantry company, known as the 
"Patrick Henry Rifles," Co. C, 3d Va. Reg't, later 15th Va. 
Reg't, and fought through to Appomattox. 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 51 

stood the example of his Hfe-long model, Wash- 
ington, who, having fought with Braddock 
under the Enghsh flag, when war came between 
England and his State, threw in his lot with his 
people. To him his thoughts recurred not only 
at this moment of supreme decision, but years 
afterwards in the seclusion of the Httle mountain- 
town, where he spent the evening of his days as 
the head of the academic institution which 
Washington had endowed. 

Two or three days later, on the 20th of April, 
the same day on which he tendered the resigna- 
tion of his command of his regiment of cav- 
alry, he wrote to both his brother and sister, 
informing them of the grounds of his action. 
To his brother, with whom he had had an ear- 
nest consultation on the subject two days before, 
he stated that he had no desire ever again to 
draw his sword save in defence of his native 
State. To his sister he wrote: 

"With all my devotion to the Union and the 
feehng of loyalty and duty of an American citi- 
zen, I have not been able to make up my mind 
to raise my hand against my relatives, my 
children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned 
my commission in the army, and save in defence 
of my native State, with the sincere hope that 
my poor services may never be needed, I hope I 



52 ROBERT E. LEE 

may never be called on to draw my sword. I 
know you will blame me; but you must think as 
kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have 
endeavored to do what I thought right." 

All that we know is that, sacrificing place and 
honors and emoluments; leaving his home to the 
sack of the enemy already preparing to seize it, 
he decided in the sight of God, under the 
all-compelHng sense of duty, and this is enough 
for us to know. His letter to General Scott 
tendering his resignation is full of noble dignity 
and not without a note of noble pathos. "I 
shall carry to the grave," he says in its conclu- 
sion, "the most grateful recollection of your 
kind consideration, and your name and fame 
will always be dear to me." And to his dying 
day he always held his old commander in un- 
diminished aflPection. 

Yet, however clear Lee was in his view as 
to his own duty, he left others to judge for 
themselves. Holding that the matter was one of 
conscience, he did not attempt to decide the 
momentous question for others — not even for his 
own son. Nearly a month after he had resigned 
(May 13, 1861), he wrote his wife, "Tell Custis 
he must consult his own judgment, reason, and 
conscience as to the course he may take. I do 
not wish him to be guided by my wishes or ex- 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 53 

ample. If I have done wrong let him do better. 
The present is a momentous question, which 
every man must settle for himself and upon 
principle." 

After the war, when he was, perhaps, the most 
famous captain of the world, he from time to 
time recurred to this action. For example, in a 
letter to General Beauregard, written the day 
after his entrance on his duties at Washington 
College, he refers to it. 

"I need not tell you," he says, "that true 
patriotism sometimes requires men to act ex- 
actly contrary at one period to that which it 
does at another — and the motive which impels 
them — the desire to do right — is precisely the 
same. History is full of illustrations of this. 
Washington himself is an example. [He was 
ever his example.] He fought at one time 
against the French under Braddock, in the ser- 
vice of the King of Great Britain; at another he 
fought with the French at Yorktown, under the 
orders of the Continental Congress, against him. 
He has not been branded by the world with re- 
proach for this; but his course has been ap- 
plauded." 

To the Committee of Congress before which 
he was called after the war, he stated that he re- 
signed because he beheved that the act of Vir- 



54 ROBERT E. LEE 

ginia in withdrawing herself from the United 
States carried him along with it as a citizen of 
Virginia, and that her laws and acts were bind- 
ing upon him.* 

On one other occasion he stated his motives 
in his action at this crisis. f He says, "I must 
give you my thanks for doing me the justice 
to believe that my conduct during the last five 
years has been governed by my sense of duty. 
I had no other guide, nor had I any other object 
than the defence of those principles of American 
Liberty upon which the Constitutions of the 
several States were originally founded, and un- 
less they are strictly observed I fear there will 
be an end to Republican Government in this 
country." 

While the harpies were screaming and clam- 
oring; and blind partisanry was declaiming 
about leaving him to the "avenging pen of 
History," his high soul dwelt in the serene air 
of consciousness of duty performed. He said 
to General Wade Hampton in June, 1869, "I 
could have taken no other course save in dis- 
honor, and if it were all to be gone over again I 
should act in precisely the same way." 

* Report of Joint Com. on Reconstruction, ist Sess., 39th 
Cong., p. 133. 

t In a letter of July 9, 1866, to an old friend in Illinois, Captain 
James May. 



THE CHOICE OF HERCULES 55 

Thus spoke his constant soul. It was his de- 
Hberate judgment on calm reflection, with all 
the consequences known to him. As before 
writing it he cast his mind back he must have 
seen everything in the clear light of the inex- 
orable past — the sacrifice of the chief command 
of the Union armies, with a great fleet at his 
back to keep open his lines of communication, 
hold the world for his recruiting ground, and 
blockade the enemy's country until starvation 
forced capitulation. It had lifted Grant from 
poverty and obscurity to the Presidency, while 
his own choice, to follow his State and obey her 
sacred laws, had reduced him from station and 
afl^uence to poverty and toil. His beautiful 
home had been confiscated and turned into a 
cemetery, and its priceless treasures, endeared 
by association with Washington, had been 
seized and scattered. A trial for treason had 
been threatened and the furious pack were yet 
trying to hunt him down. Yet there was no re- 
pining — no questioning. "There was quietness 
in that man's mind." When the sky was darkened 
he had simply lighted the candles and gone on 
with his duty. 

" Duty is the sublimest word in our language," 
he had declared long before, and by it as a pilot- 
star he ever steered his steadfast course, abiding 



56 ROBERT E. LEE 

with calm satisfaction whatever issue God 
decreed. 

"We are conscious that we have humbly 
tried to do our duty," he said, about a year after 
the war; "we may, therefore, with calm satis- 
faction trust in God and leave results to him." 

In this devotion to duty and calm reliance on 
God lay the secret of his life. The same spirit 
animated his great lieutenant. "Duty belongs 
to us, consequences belong to God," said Jack- 
son. The same spirit animated the men who 
followed them. It was the teaching of the 
Southern home, which produced the type of 
character, the deep foundations of which were 
devotion to duty and reliance on God. 



CHAPTER IV 

RESOURCES 

A ND now, dealing with the fruits of character, 
we come to the proposition, whether Lee 
was, as some have claimed, a great captain only 
for defensive operations, or was a great captain 
without reservation or limitation — one of the 
great captains of history whose genius was equal 
to every exigency of war to which human genius 
may rise. 

The question involved is of his greatness both 
as a soldier and as a man. And to some extent 
it reaches far beyond the confines of the South 
and involves the basic traits of race and of civil- 
ization. It was nobly said by Mr. Charles 
Francis Adams, Sr., to whom almost as much as 
to Lincoln or Grant the final result of the war 
was due, when, as the representative of the 
United States in England, he was challenged on 
an occasion with the argument that the armies of 
the South had defeated the armies of the North, 
and was asked what he had to say about it, 
"That they also are my countrymen." Thus, 

57 



58 ROBERT E. LEE 

Lee's genius and Lee's fame are the possession 
of the whole country and the whole race which 
his virtue honored. 

We may ask ourselves first, what constitutes a 
great captain ? The question takes us far into 
the records of both War and Peace. To most 
men the answer will come by the process of re- 
calling the few — the very few — whom history has 
by universal consent placed in the first rank. 
They are Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Freder- 
ick, and Napoleon, with Cromwell, Turenne, 
Eugene, Gustavus, Marlborough, Washington, 
Wellington, in a class so close to them in fame as 
to leave in doubt the rank to which at least one 
or two of them should be assigned. And on 
their heels crowd a concourse of captains great 
and victorious, yet easily distinguishable from the 
first, if confusingly close on the others. 

Napoleon reckoned, as his masters for constant 
study, the first four and Gustavus, Turenne and 
Eugene. 

Among the modern captains stand two con- 
spicuous Americans: Washington, whose great- 
ness proved equal to every exaction and who 
gave promise that he would have commanded 
successfully under all conditions that might 
have arisen; and the persistent, indomitable 
Grant, victor of Vicksburg, Missionary Ridge 



RESOURCES 59 

and Appomattox, not so brilliant as Marlborough 
or Frederick, for no flashing stroke of genius like 
Blenheim or Leuthen adorned his record, but 
able, resourceful, constant, indomitable, like 
Scipio or Cromwell. 

What placed those few men in the first rank 
before all others ? Not final success. For 
though success final and absolute crowned most 
of them, final and irrevocable defeat was the last 
reward of others and these the greatest: Han- 
nibal and Napoleon. Such rank then was won 
notwithstanding final defeat; and in reckoning 
its elements, final success bears no definite part. 

Studying these captains closely, what gifts do 
we discern in all, divided as they were by cen- 
turies and by the equally vast gulf of racial dif- 
erences ^ First, Imagination — the divine imagi- 
nation to conceive a great cause and the means 
to support it. It may be to conquer the world; or 
Rome; or Europe. I conceive that it was this 
supreme gift that led Alexander to sleep with the 
casket-set of the lUiads under his pillow with his 
dagger and to declare them the best compendium 
of the soldier's art. 

Next there must be the comprehensive grasp 
that seizes and holds firmly great campaigns in 
their completeness together with the mastery of 
every detail in their execution, both great and 



6o ROBERT E. LEE 

small. There must be a tireless mind in a tire- 
less body, informed with zeal; incarnate energy; 
the mental, moral and physical courage in com- 
plete and overpowering combination to compel 
men to obedience, instant and loyal under all 
conditions whatsoever; to inspire them with new 
forces and the power to carry out orders through 
every possible chance and change. These give 
the grand strategy. Its foundation is the combi- 
nation in a brave soldier of a rare imagination 
and of a rarer intellect. No amount of fighting 
power or of capacity for calling it forth in others 
proves this endowment. In the Napoleonic 
wars, "Ney and Bliicher," says Henderson, 
"were probably the best fighting generals of 
France and Prussia. But neither could be 
trusted to conduct a campaign.'' * 

Then there must be the supreme constancy to 
withstand every shock of surprise or defeat with- 
out a tremor or a doubt, before which mere 
courage becomes paltry, and constant, imminent 
danger dwindles to a bare incident, serving only 
to quicken the spirit and fan its last ember to a 
consuming flame. 

With these must exist an intuitive and pro- 
found knowledge of human nature and of men, 
singly and in combination; power to divine the 

* Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson," I., p. 93. 



RESOURCES 6i 

adversary's every design and to fathom his deep- 
est intention; equal to every exigency, amount- 
ing to inspiration; all culminating in the power 
to foresee, to prepare for, divine and seize the 
critical moment and win where others would 
lose, or, having lost, save where others would be 
destroyed; and equally profound and exact 
knowledge of the art of war as practised by the 
great masters of all ages. And finally, fusing 
all in one complete and harmonious whole, 
crowning this whole with the one final and abso- 
lute essential must be the God-given personal 
endowment of genius; undefined, undefinable; 
sometimes flaming at the very first, sometimes 
slumbering through years to burst forth at some 
moment of supreme crisis; sometimes hardly 
recognized until its light is caught down the 
long perspective of the years, but when caught 
recognized as genius. 

Without this a man may be a great captain, a 
victorious captain; but not the greatest or among 
the greatest. 

Thus, we come to the measure of Lee's great- 
ness as a captain. 

The measure of a captain's abilities must rest, 
at last, on his achievement as gauged by his re- 
sources. 

Let us see what Lee accomplished with his 



62 ROBERT E. LEE 

means; then we shall be the better able to reckon 
the measure of his success. Let us turn aside 
for a moment for the consideration of a few 
figures. They are a dry and unpalatable diet, 
but, after all, it was to the science of arithmetic 
that the South yielded at the end. 

The South began the war with a white popu- 
lation of about 5,500,000. Of these her mili- 
tary population numbered about 1,065,000.* 

The North began the war with a white popu- 
lation of about 22,000,000. Of these her fight- 
ing men, whom she could call into the field, 
numbered about 3,900,ooo.f 

The South enlisted about 900,000. The 
North enrolled of her fighting men about 1,700,- 
000; { besides which she enlisted of foreigners 
about 700,000, and of negroes about 186,000. 

The North had an organized National Govern- 
ment with all departments — State, War, Navy, 
Treasury and Justice, perfectly organized and 
equipped, while the South had to organize her 
Confederated Government. The North had about 

* Besides these she had a servile population of about 3,500,000, 
of which a certain proportion were available for raising subsistence 
for the army. 

t Besides, of the negroes the North drew into her armies about 
•186,000, they being the most able-bodied of this class. 

XCf. "Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America," pp. 40 
and 50. Colonel Thomas L. Livermore. Houghton, Mifflin 
&Co. 



RESOURCES 63 

$11,000,000,000 of taxable values as against 
about ;?5,ooo,ooo,ooo in the South, of which 
fc,ooo,ooo,ooo was represented by the slaves. 
The North had by far the best means of trans- 
portation, a large percentage of the efficient 
railways and the means of railway equipment. 

In addition to this the North had nearly all 
the manufactures, and possessed a superiority 
in equipment that is incalculable. When the 
war broke out, the South could scarcely manu- 
facture a tin-cup or a frying-pan, a railway-iron, 
a wool-card, or a carpenter's tool. The North 
possessed nearly the whole old Navy, the naval 
forces, and the population from which the sea- 
men were drawn. And finally and above all, 
the North had the ear of the world. 

With this superiority she was enabled to 
blockade the South and lock her within her own 
confines, while the world was open to her and 
she could await with what patience she could 
command, the fatal result of "the policy of 
attrition." 

No adequate account of the value of the Navy 
to the Union side has ever been given, or, at 
least, has ever reached the public ear. Had the 
Navy been on the side of the Confederacy in- 
stead of on the Union side, it is as certain that 
the South would have made good her position 



64 ROBERT E. LEE 

as is any other fact established By reason. The 
Navy with its 200,000 men enabled the Union 
not only to seal up the South against all aid 
from without, but to penetrate into the heart 
of the Confederacy, command her interior 
waters and form at once the base of supplies 
for the Union Armies when advancing and their 
protection when defeated.* 

It is not meant to imply that figures give an 
exact statement of the problem that was worked 
out during the war; but they cast a light upon it 
which contributes greatly to its just compre- 
hension. 

In round numbers the South had on her 
muster-rolls, from first to last, less than 900,000 
men. And in this list the South had all she 
could muster; for, at the last, she had enlisted 
in her reserves all men between sixteen and sixty 
years. In round numbers the North had 2,700,- 
000, and besides, had all Europe as her recruit- 
ing field. t 

*C/". Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson," I., Chap. V., p. 113. 
" Judicious indeed," he says, " was the policy which at the very 
outset of the war brought the tremendous pressure of the sea- 
power to bear against the South." 

t Col. Thomas S. Livermore of Boston, author of the notable 
work, "Numbers and Losses," in a letter to the writer, says, "I 
suppose that it would be safe to assume that eighty per cent, (of 
the enlistments) would hold in all the Northern States. This 
would give about 2,234,000 individuals in the army. The Record 



RESOURCES 65 

When the war closed, the South had in the 
field, throughout her territory, but 175,000 men 
opposed to the armies of the North, numbering 
980,000 men.* 

and Business Bureau, in its memorandum of 1896, computed the 
average estimates of reenlistments by different authorities at 
S43>393-" 

The Confederate forces he estimates at " 1,239,000, the number 
shown by the census to have been within the conscript age, less the 
number of exempts (partly estimated and partly recorded), and an 
estimateof the natural deaths; or at about 1,000,000 estimated pro- 
portionally to the killed and wounded in the two armies." It will be 
seen that his first estimate above takes no account of the numbers 
of Southerners in the mountain regions who sided with the Union. 

Gen. Marcus J.Wright places the total number of the Southern 
troops at less than 700,000. The total number within the 
conscript age he places at 1,000,065. 

Henderson, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," estimates them 
at about 900,000. 

I have felt that possibly this trained and impartial soldier of an- 
other nation might have arrived at a fairer estimate than any one 
on this side the Atlantic. 

For calculations of Col. Livermore and General Wright, see 
Appendix A. 

*Of 346,744 Federal soldiers examined for military service 
after March 6, 1863, sixty-nine per cent were Americans, the rest 
were foreigners. In the 35th Massachusetts Regiment, which, 
says Henderson, may be taken as a typical Northern regiment, of 
495 recruits received during 1864, 400 were German immigrants. 
— Henderson's "Life of Stonewall Jackson," ist Ed., I., p. 466. 

The South, or rather those orators who stood as the econo- 
mists of the South, had supposed that her cotton and tobacco were 
so necessary to the rest of the world that the European nations 
would take her part, out of plain consideration for their own wel- 
fare. It was a great error. The value of the cotton crop exported 
in i860 was $202,741,351. In 1861, it was $42,000,000. In 
1862, it was $4,000,000. After that it was next to nothing. 



66 ROBERT E. LEE 

Towards the close of the war the South was 
well nigh stripped naked, and for what was left 
she had no means of transportation. She had 
no nitre for her powder; no brass for her per- 
cussion caps; the very kettles and stills from the 
plantations had been used; and when it was nec- 
essary to repair one railroad as a line for trans- 
portation, to meet the emergency the best rails 
were taken up from another road less important. 

The commissariat and the quartermaster's de- 
partment were bad enough. Study of the 
matter will, however, convince any one that 
at the very last it was rather owing to the des- 
perate condition of the lines of transportation 
than to mere inefficiency of the commissariat 
and the quartermaster's department, to which 
it has been so often charged, that Lee failed to 
carry out his final plan of effecting a junction 
with Johnston.* 

In fact, from the first, a considerable propor- 
tion of the equipment of the Southern armies 
and all of their best equipment had been cap- 
tured by them on the field of battle. So regu- 
lar had been their application to this source of 
supply that, says Henderson in his "Life of 

* I can remember my surprise as a boy at seeing wagons 
hauling straw from my home to Petersburg, sixty-odd miles, 
through roads the like of which, I trust in Grace, do not now exist 
in the United States. 



RESOURCES 67 

Stonewall Jackson," "the dishonesty of the 
Northern contractors was a constant source of 
complaint among the soldiers of the Army of 
Northern Virginia." 

An English soldier and critic, Colonel Lawler, 
writing in Blackwood' s Magazine, has declared 
his doubt whether any general of modern history 
could have sustained for four years — a longer 
time nowadays than Hannibal's fifteen years 
in Italy in times past — a war in which, possessed 
of scanty resources himself, he had against him 
so enormous an aggregate of men, horses, ships 
and supplies; it is an under, rather than an over 
estimate to state that during the first two years, 
the odds all told were ten to one, during the last 
two years, twenty to one, against the Confed- 
erates.* 

Truly, then, said General Lee to General 
Early, in the winter of 1865-6, "It will be diffi- 
cult to get the world to understand the odds 
against which we fought." 

It is known by some in the South, the surviv- 
ors of those armies who tracked the frozen roads 
of Virginia with bleeding feet; whose breakfast 
was often nothing but water from a road-side 
well and whose dinner nothing but a tightened 
belt. Some knew it who knew the war-swept 

♦Jones's "Lee," p. 75. 



68 ROBERT E. LEE 

South in their boyhood, where the threat was 
that a crow flying over it should have to carry 
his rations, and the fact was more terrible than 
the prophecy. 

But it is well for the race to make the world 
know it. 

In the foregoing computation it is true enough 
to say that we have not reckoned all the resources 
of the South. She had Lee and she had Jack- 
son; she had the men who followed them and 
the women who sustained those men. "Lee and 
Jackson," says Henderson, in his "Life of 
Stonewall Jackson," "were worth 200,000 men 
to any armies they commanded." Quoting 
Moltke's saying that the junction of two armies 
on the field of battle is the highest achievement 
of military genius, he says in comment: "Tried 
by this test alone, Lee stands out as one of the 
greatest soldiers of all time. Not only against 
Pope, but against McClellan at Gaines's Mill, 
against Burnside at Fredericksburg and against 
Hooker at Chancellorsville, he succeeded in carry- 
ing out the operations of which Moltke speaks." 
But this is not all. No reckoning of the oppos- 
ing forces can be made without taking into ac- 
count the men who followed Lee and Jackson, 
and the women who stayed at home and sustained 
them. No people ever gave more promptly to 



RESOURCES 69 

their country's cause than did the old American 
element of the North, or would have been 
readier had occasion arisen to suffer on their 
country's behalf. But it is no disparagement 
of them to state the simple fact that the war did 
not reach them as a people as it reached the 
people of the South. Where a class gave at the 
North, the whole population of the South gave; 
whereas a fraction suffered at the North, the en- 
tire population of the South suffered. The rich 
grew to be as the poor, and, together with the 
poor, learned to know actual hunger. The deli- 
cately nurtured came to be hewers of wood 
and drawers of water. War in its most brutal 
and terrible form came to be known all over 
the land; known in disease without medicines; 
in life without the common necessaries of life; 
in ravaged districts; bombarded and blackened 
towns; burnt homesteads, terrorized and starv- 
ing women and children. This the South came 
to know throughout a large extent of her terri- 
tory. Yet, through it all, her people bore 
themselves with a constancy that must ever be 
a monument to them, and that even in the breast 
of those who were children in that stirring period 
must ever keep alive the hallowed memory of 
her undying resolution. 

"All honor and praise to the fair Southern 



70 ROBERT E. LEE 

women!" declared a Richmond paper in the 
closing days of 1862. *'May the future his- 
torian when he comes to write of this war fail 
not to award them their due share of praise." 
No history of this war could be written without 
such due award. It is not too much to say that 
as brave and constant as were the intrepid 
soldiery that, with steadily wasting ranks, fol- 
lowed Lee from Seven Pines to Appomattox, 
even more brave and constant were the women 
who stayed at home. Gentle and simple, they 
gave their husbands, their brothers and their 
sons to the cause of the South, sorrowing chiefly 
that they themselves were too feeble to stand at 
their side. Hungering in body and heart they 
bore with more than a soldier's courage, more 
than a soldier's hardship, and to the last, un- 
daunted and dauntless, gave them a new courage 
as with tear-dimmed eyes they sustained them 
in the darkest hours of their despondency and 
defeat. 

Such were among the elements which even in 
the South's darkest hour Lee had at his back. 
From such elements Lee himself had sprung 
and in his character he was their supreme ex- 
pression. 



CHAPTER V 

LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA 

A ND now, bearing clearly in mind what his 
resources were, we may approach the ques- 
tion intelligently: whether Lee was, as charged by 
some, great only in defence and when on interior 
lines and behind breast-works, or was really the 
greatest soldier of his time, and, perhaps, of the 
English-speaking race. 

Immediately on his resignation from the 
Army of the United States, Lee was tendered 
by the Governor of Virginia the command of 
the forces of the State which was in the throes 
of preparation to repel the invasion of her ter- 
ritory, and on the 23d of April he received at 
the hands of the President of the State Con- 
vention the commission of Major-General of the 
Virginia forces. The President of the Conven- 
tion, the Hon. John Janney, in a brief speech, 
recalling the example of Washington, an- 
nounced to him the fact that the Convention 
had by a unanimous vote, expressed their con- 
viction that among living Virginians he was 

71 



72 ROBERT E. LEE 

"first in war"; that they prayed he might so 
conduct the operations committed to his charge 
that it should soon be said of him that he was 
"first in peace," -^nd that when that time came, 
he should have earned the still prouder dis- 
tinction of being "first in the hearts of his 
countrymen." He further recalled to him that 
Washington in his will had given his swords 
to his favorite nephews with an injunction that 
they should never be drawn from their scab- 
bards except in self-defence or in^efence of 
the rights and liberties of their co^mtry. 

He said inclosing, "Yestepd^y your mother 
Virginia placed her sword/fn your/ hand, upon 
the implied condition that 'vs^e'Tcnow you will 
keep to the letter and in spiriiby^that you will 
draw it only in defense and th^t you will fall 
with it in your hand rather than the 'bbject for 
which it was placed there should fail." 

To this Lee replied in the following simple 
words: "Mr. President and gentlemen of the 
Convention: Profoundly impressed with the 
solemnity of the occasion, for which I must say 
I was not prepared, I accept the position as- 
signed me by your partiality. I would have 
much preferred that your choice had fallen 
upon an abler man. Trusting in Almighty God, 
an approving conscience and the aid of my 



LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA 73 

fellow-citizens, I devote myself to the service of 
my native State, in whose behalf alone will I 
ever again draw my sword." 

Thus, passing into the ser^ 'ce of his native 
State in the dire hour of her need, Lee was ap- 
pointed a Major-General of Virginia's forces to 
resist the invasion of Virginia's soil, and it was 
not until war was flagrant throughout the land, 
and Virginia had been actually invaded that he 
became an officer of the Confederate States. 

His first service was to put Virginia in a pos- 
ture of defence. That he promptly effected this 
was shown on the plain of Manassas on July 
2 1 St. He was the third in rank of the Major- 
Generals appointed by Mr. Davis, and to this 
fact was due his assignment to Western Virginia. 

Indeed, it is stated that so far was General 
Lee from being influenced by any considerations 
of a selfish nature that when Virginia joined the 
Southern Confederacy and left him without 
rank, he seriously contemplated enlisting in the 
company of cavalry commanded by his son.* 

The game, as it appears now to all and as it 
appeared then to those who had to shoulder the 
responsibility of playing it, was, on the one side, 
the sealing up of the South within its own bor- 
ders; the suppression of the power of the Border 

♦Jones's " Life and Letters of Robert E. Lee." 



74 ROBERT E. LEE 

States, such as Maryland, Kentucky and Mis- 
souri, to join the South, and the cutting in two 
of the section already seceded; on the other, it 
was the simple maintenance of the status quo of 
the seceded section; the power to exercise the 
right of secession in the Border States; and the 
resistance of invasion. There was no claim on 
the part of the South to the right of invasion and 
no thought of invasion of the North until the ex- 
actions of war made it necessary as a counter- 
stroke. Even after the victory of Manassas the 
Confederate Government held back the eager 
Jackson and sustained the prudent Johnston. 
Such being the game it was played on both sides 
with clear vision and impressive determination. 
And no one saw more clearly than Lee the mag- 
nitude of the impending struggle. 

Of Lee's far-sightedness we have signal proof 
in his letters. While others discussed the war 
as a matter of days and occasion for a summer 
holiday, he, with wider knowledge and clearer 
prevision, reckoned its duration at full four 
years, and possibly at even ten. It is said that 
one of the few speeches he ever made was that 
in which, responding to urgent calls from a 
crowd assembled at a railway station to see him, 
he, in a few grave sentences, bade them go 
home and prepare for a long and terrible war. 



LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA 75 

"We must make up our minds/' he wrote in 
February of 1862, "to meet with reverses and 
to overcome them. But the contest must be 
long and the whole country has to go through 
much suffering." * 

His views on the matter of the Trent were as 
sound as though he had been trained in di- 
plomacy all his life. "I think," he writes, "the 
United States Government, notwithstanding this 
moral and political commitment at Wilkes' act, 
if it finds that England is earnest, and that it 
will have to fight or retract, will retract. We 
must make up our minds to fight our battles 
ourselves, expect to receive aid from no one, 
and make every' necessary sacrifice of money, 
comfort and labor to bring the war to a success- 
ful close. The cry is too much for help. I am 
mortified to hear it. We want no aid. We 
want to be true to ourselves, to be prudent, 
just and bold." f 

The first steps taken at the North were to 
blockade the Southern ports from the Chesa- 
peake to the Rio Grande with the efficient navy 
of the Union; to seize the Mississippi and to 
overawe the Border States. 

* Letters to Mrs. Lee, dated April 30, 1861, and February 8, 
1862. Jones's "Lee," p. 150. 

t Letter to his son, Gen. G. W. C. Lee, December 29, 1861. 



76 ROBERT E. LEE 

The western portion of Virginia, traversed by 
the great Appalachian Range stretching in a 
vast barrier across the State, and penetrated only 
by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, had, partly 
by reason of the origin and character of the 
population, partly by reason of their direct asso- 
ciation with the North and West, but mainly 
owing to the absence of slaves among them, been 
unaffected by the causes which created the 
friction between the North and South. Here in 
this mountainous and substantially non-slave- 
holding region, bordering on the States of Ohio 
and Pennsylvania, and mainly trading by way 
of the Ohio River and the Baltimore and Ohio 
Railroad with the North and West, the popula- 
tion was almost as strongly Union in sentiment 
as that of the States with which they marched, 
and, finally, when the conflict came, the major 
portion of the population sided with the North 
and stood for the Union. And here McClellan, 
outmatching the commands and the commanders 
opposed to him, soon showed substantial success 
for the Union side. 

The importance of securing this great sec- 
tion of the leading Southern State was mani- 
fest to both sides, and from the first troops 
were thrown into the State by both sides to con- 
trol and hold it. General Garnett had been 



LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA ']^ 

early dispatched with a command to protect 
the western border, and awe into submission the 
wavering and the disaffected. The course of 
events, however, had made the eastern rather 
than the western border of this section the seat 
of operations, with Harper's Ferry and Win- 
chester as the key to the situation, and when 
Harper's Ferry, soon after the first outbreak 
of war, fell into the hands of the Federal 
troops, McClellan had seized the passes that 
commanded the western region and fortified 
them strongly. The gallant Garnett had fallen 
soon after the evacuation of Harper's Ferry, 
and Rosecrans, who had succeeded to the 
command of the troops dispatched to hold 
Western Virginia on McClellan's being trans- 
ferred to Washington, was now leading an in- 
vading force up the Kanawha, while Reynolds 
was posted on the Cheat River to guard the chief 
avenue of communication between the East and 
the West. 

The Confederate forces in this mountainous 
region were divided into several detachments, 
two of them on the Kanawha under command, 
respectively, of Generals Floyd and Wise, and two 
others farther eastward under Generals Loring 
and H.R.Jackson, among whom the spirit of co- 
operation left much to be desired. Owing part- 



78 ROBERT E. LEE 

\y to the hostility of the population and partly 
to the lack of harmony among the commanding 
officers, the cause of the South steadily waned in 
this trans-Alleghany region, and in July, after 
Johnston had been offered the command in this 
territory and had declined the billet, General Lee 
was sent out to Western Virginia to take com- 
mand of the somewhat disorganized forces in that 
hostile region. His reputation, gained among 
the mountains of Mexico, was doubtless one of 
the motives which ruled when he was assigned to 
duty among the mountains of Western Virginia; 
but even his abilities were not equal to con- 
quering the conditions which he found prevailing 
there. Old soldiers with whom I have discussed 
the causes of the result of this campaign have 
never given wholly satisfactory reasons for it, 
but have felt assured that all that could have 
been accomplished Lee accompHshed. They 
have felt that in the first place the dissensions 
of the officers previously in command had 
tended to demoralize the troops; then, that the 
sickness among the troops unaccustomed to the 
exposure or prostrated by an epidemic of typhoid 
fever, measles, and other diseases, impaired 
their efficiency, and finally, that the unlooked-for 
hostihty of the population at large, in a region 
where it was difficult, at best, to maintain lines 



LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA 79 

of communication, now in a season unprecedent- 
\y wet, which rendered the roads impassable, 
combined with lack of means of transportation 
to frustrate the plans of even as capable a com- 
mander as Lee. 

Lee's report makes mention of the difficulty of 
maintaining his lines of communication owing 
to the exhausted condition of his horses and the 
impossibihty of obtaining supplies; so it may 
be assumed that this was in his view the chief 
reason for the failure of the campaign. 

The first object of Lee's offensive operations 
was the destruction of Reynolds, posted on Cheat 
Mountain. The movement, however, proved 
a failure because the frontal attack, which 
was to be the signal for the assault intended 
to be made by the body of troops sent by night 
across the mountains to attack Reynolds' posi- 
tion in the rear, was not made as ordered by Lee, 
and the flanking force, having had their am- 
munition damaged and their provisions destroyed 
by a furious storm which raged all night, miss- 
ing the concerted signal, returned across the 
mountains without making the expected assault. 
If any one else was to blame for this failure to 
carry out Lee's well-conceived plan, the com- 
mander, with the magnanimity characteristic of 
him, simply passed it by as he later did similar 



8o ROBERT E. LEE 

failures on the part of his subordinates, assum- 
ing himself whatever blame attached to the 
failure. 

The second opportunity which apparently of- 
fered itself and was allowed by Lee to pass 
fruitlessly by, was when Rosecrans' army, 
which lay before him at Sewell's Mountain was 
allowed to slip away unmolested. Lee gave as 
his reason for his apparent non-action, that he 
was confident of defeating Rosecrans by a flank- 
ing movement which he had planned for the 
following night and that he "could not aflPord 
to sacrifice five or six hundred of his people to 
silence public clamor." 

The "public clamor" over Lee's failure was 
bitter and persistent, but he remained unruffled 
by it. With characteristic calm he simply stated 
that it was "only natural that such hasty conclu- 
sions should be reached," and gave his opinion 
that it was "better not to attempt a justification 
or defence but to go steadily on in the discharge 
of our duty to the best of our ability, leaving all 
else to the calmer judgment of the future and to 
a kind Providence." 

Happily for the South, Mr. Davis knew Lee 
better than those who were so clamorous against 
him, and the autumn having closed the cam- 
paign in Western Virginia, Lee was dispatched 



LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA 8i 

to the South to design and construct a general 
system of coast-defences along the Atlantic sea- 
board, a duty in which he displayed such genius 
that he rendered the coast cities of Georgia and 
South Carolina impregnable against all assaults 
by sea, and, protected by his chain of forts, they 
stood as memorials of his genius until Sherman 
with his victorious army attacked them by land. 
His letters give a clear picture of the difficulties 
of protecting these seaport towns against a navy 
without some sort of navy to oppose it. 

This duty performed, Lee, in the shadow of 
the vast preparations making at Washington, 
for a great invasion of Virginia, was called back 
to Richmond to advise the President of the Con- 
federacy, and the need was urgent, for Mc- 
Clellan, with Johnston falling back slowly before 
him, was marching steadily up the Peninsula, 
with an army the like of which had never been 
commanded by one man. 

The first campaign in which Lee engaged, like 
Washington's first campaign, was thus conducted 
with adverse fortune. Had Washington's mili- 
tary career closed after the retreat from Long 
Island, he would have been reckoned simply a 
brave man and a stark fighter, but one unequal 
to general command. Had Lee's career ended 
after tlie campaign in Western Virginia, when he 



82 ROBERT E. LEE 

was derisively characterized in the anti-adminis- 
tration press of Richmond, as "Evacuating 
Lee," he would have been known in history only 
as a fine organizer, a capital scout, and a bril- 
liant engineer of unusual gallantry, whose abili- 
ties as a commander were not superior to those 
of the mediocre officer who opposed him in that 
experimental campaign, and were possibly equal 
only to the command of a brigade, or at best, 
of a division. But the South and Fame awaited 
his opportunity. 

As soon as Lee was brought back from the 
South, and was again appointed military adviser 
to the President, he revolutionized the plan of 
campaign hitherto followed. His clear vision 
saw the imperative necessity of substituting an 
aggressive for a defensive policy, and he un- 
leashed the eager Jackson on the armies in the 
Valley of Virginia, keeping them fully occupied 
and so alarming Washington as to hold McDow- 
ell on the north side of the Rappahannock. 
Within a month after he was placed in com- 
mand he perfected his plans and fell upon 
McClellan and defeated the greatest army that 
had ever stood on American soil. The next 
three years proved beyond cavil that in the first 
campaign, as always, all that could have been 
done with his forces by any one, was done by 



LEE IN WEST VIRGINIA 83 

Lee. Within one year, indeed, he had laid the 
foundation of a fame, as a great captain, as en- 
during as Marlborough's or Wellington's. 

Three years from this time "this colonel of 
cavalry" surrendered a muster-roll of 26,000 
men; of which barely 8,000 muskets showed up, 
to an army of over 130,000 men, commanded by 
the most determined and able general that the 
North had found, and, defeated, sheathed his 
sword with what will undoubtedly become the 
reputation of the greatest captain and the no- 
blest character of his time. 

In this period he had fought three of the great- 
est campaigns in all the history of war and de- 
stroyed the reputation of more generals than 
any captain had ever done in the same space of 
time. His last campaign alone, even ending as 
it did in defeat, would have sufficed to fix him 
forever as a star of the first magnitude in the 
constellation of great captains. Though he suc- 
cumbed at last to the "policy of attrition" pur- 
sued by his patient and able antagonist, it was 
not until Grant had lost in the campaign over 
124,000 men, two men for every one that Lee 
had in his army from the beginning of the 
campaign. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SITUATION WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 

TIT^HEN McClellan moved on Richmond, the 
fortunes of the South appeared to be at 
a lower ebb than they ever v^ere again until the 
winter of 1864. 

The general plan for prosecution of the war 
on the part of the North was the same that had 
been laid down at the beginning: that is, to hold 
the Border States; to blockade the Southern ports 
and attack by sea; and to seize the navigable 
rivers running far up into her territory, espe- 
cially the Mississippi, and thereby cut the South 
in two. By the end of spring, 1862, nearly the 
whole of this far-reaching and sagacious plan 
had been measurably accomplished. Mary- 
land, Missouri and Kentucky had been held 
firmly, and in all three States, except Missouri, 
Secession had been forcibly prevented, while Mis- 
souri had been substantially conquered. 

The very next day, after the rout at Bull Run, 
Mr. Lincoln, awakening to the gravity of the 
situation, had called for 500,000 men, and the 

84 



WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 85 

North had responded with fervor. Between the 
4th of August and the loth of October more 
than no regiments and 30 battaHons, com- 
prising at least 112,000 men, were added to the 
forces in Washington and its neighborhood.* 
The ablest organizer in the army had been called 
to the task of organization, and proved to have a 
genius for it. All autumn and winter he labored 
at the work and when spring came Washington 
had been strongly fortified, and McClellan found 
himself at the head of possibly the largest, best 
equipped and best drilled army ever commanded 
by one man in modern times. 

The spring of 1862 had been spent by the 
Government of the United States in preparation 
for a campaign which should retrieve the errors 
and disasters of the preceding year and, by 
making certain the capture of Richmond, "the 
heart of the Confederacy," should end the war 
by one great and decisive stroke. It was well 
said that without McClellan there had been no 
Grant. 

Several plans for attacking Richmond pre- 
sented themselves, all of which included the 
idea of cutting off the city from communica- 
tion with the Southwest. One was by way of 
the Shenandoah Valley, striking the Virginia 

* Ropes's " Story of the Civil War," I, p, 167. 



86 ROBERT E. LEE 

Central Railroad at Staunton or Waynesboro; 
and marching on Richmond by way of Char- 
lottesville, whence a railway line ran to South- 
west Virginia and Tennessee; one by way of 
Manassas; one by the Chesapeake Bay and the 
lower Rappahannock; and finally one by way 
of the Chesapeake Bay and the peninsula lying 
between the York and the James, which pre- 
sented the opportunity under certain contin- 
gencies of seizing Petersburg and isolating 
Richmond from the South. 

The practicability of all of these plans of in- 
vasion had to be considered quite as carefully 
in Richmond as in Washington, and the possi- 
bility of each one of them being adopted had to 
be provided against. As the junction at Ma- 
nassas had proved to be the key to the situation 
in the first effort, and its use had enabled the 
Valley forces to be brought across the Blue 
Ridge in the nick of time for the final move- 
ment in the battle there, so it still remained the 
most important point in Central Virginia, and 
Johnston's army was placed there to guard it 
and at the same time keep Washington in a 
state of anxiety. The Washington authorities 
were in favor of trying their fortune against this 
point. McClellan, however, favored the route 
by the Rappahannock. McClellan's first plan 



WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 87 

was to march to Annapolis and then transport 
his army, 140,000 men, to Urbana, on the south 
bank of the Rappahannock and "occupy Rich- 
mond before it could be strongly reinforced." * 

This plan he was forbidden to adopt, though 
he considered it the best of all the plans, and he 
thereupon selected the route by way of Fortress 
Monroe and the Peninsula, against the views 
of the Government authorities, who greatly de- 
sired him to adopt the overland route by 
Manassas across which Johnston lay with an 
army then believed to number over 100,000 men; 
but really containing certainly less than half 
that number. f 

Illness during the autumn and early winter 
of 1 86 1 prevented McClellan's acting with the 
efficiency which he might otherwise have shown; 
but even more disastrous than this was his de- 
termination not to move until he had an army 
sufficiently great and properly organized to make 
his success assured. For this reason mainly he 
resisted alike the importunities of the President 
and the Secretary of War and the clamor of the 
public until on toward the spring; by which time 
he had sacrificed the good will of the former and 
the confidence of both. 

* John C. Ropes's "Story of the Civil War," I, p. 266, citing 
McClellan's letter to Stanton. 5 W. R., 45. f Ibid. 



88 ROBERT E. LEE 

Jackson settled the question of the Shenan- 
doah Valley plan by the battle of Winchester 
and his brilliant retreat between two converging 
armies down the Valley, followed by the victory 
of Port Republic. The authorities in Washing- 
ton decided against the Lower Rappahannock 
plan and gave McClellan his choice between the 
overland route by way of Manassas, and the 
Fortress Monroe plan, and he states that "of 
course he selected the latter," adding a jibe at 
the fears of the administration and a suggestion 
of their disloyalty to him.* 

This decision was reached by him in the first 
week in March, and on the 9th of March John- 
ston, under orders from Mr. Davis, withdrew his 
army from Manassas and fell back to the Rap- 
pahannock and thence toward Richmond, im- 
mediately on which McClellan occupied Manas- 
sas with the greater part of his army,f to give 
them training and with a view to opening the 
railway from Manassas, where Banks's head- 
quarters were to be, to Strasburg in the Shenan- 
doah Valley. About the middle of March 
McClellan began to ship his troops to Fortress 
Monroe, a movement which proceeded rapidly, 
and Johnston, thereupon, " his movements con- 

* "McClellan's Own Story," p. 227. 

t Ropes's "Story of the Civil War," I, p. 255. 



WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 89 

trolled by McClellan," marched to the Penin- 
sula, where Magruder with only some 13,000 
men at Yorktown had handled them so ably 
that McClellan was led to believe his force 
much larger than it was. Unwilling to leave 
such a force on his flank McClellan had sat 
down to besiege Yorktown and was held there 
until the beginning of May (3d), when, on the 
eve of his assault, Magruder marched out and 
fell back on Williamsburg, where a sharp fight 
occurred, resulting in a victory for the Federal 
General, though the Confederate Army was 
withdrawn intact. 

The possession of a fleet gave to the Union 
forces the command of the Chesapeake, of the 
Potomac, of the York and (after the sinking of 
the Merrimac by her commander) of the James 
to within a day's march of Richmond. 

In January Thomas had won the battle of Mill 
Springs in Kentucky, which made the Union 
forces dominant in that region. In February 
(6th) Fort Henry, on the Tennessee, had been 
captured, and four days later (the loth) Fort 
Donelson, on the Cumberland, had surren- 
dered unconditionally to a general hitherto al- 
most unknown, to whom the Government had 
been inclined to turn the cold shoulder, but who 
was to become better known thereafter. By 



90 ROBERT E. LEE 

these victories the upper Mississippi, the Cum- 
berland and the Tennessee came into the control 
of the Federal forces, and all that was needed was 
to obtain mastery of the lower Mississippi to 
leave the Confederacy rent in twain. The forts 
at Hatteras Inlet had been reduced in August 
(28th). Hilton Head and Beaufort, in North 
Carolina had been captured, following Admiral 
DuPont's reduction of the forts on Port Royal 
Inlet; and Roanoke Island and Newberne, 
N. C, had been captured in the first half of 
March, 1862. On April 6th, Albert Sydney 
Johnston, deemed up till now the South's most 
brilliant soldier, had substantially won a battle 
against the captor of Forts Henry and Donel- 
son, but had been shot in the hour of victory, 
and that night, Buell having reached the 
field with fresh troops, the Confederate forces 
had been in turn defeated. It is probable that 
but for the fall of Johnston, who bled to death 
through neglecting his wound in his eagerness 
to push his victory on the 6th, Grant's fort- 
unate star might have set at Shiloh instead of 
rising higher and higher in the next three 
years to reach its zenith at Appomattox. As 
it was, the upper Mississippi, with its great 
tributaries, was in complete control of the 
Union, and on April 24th Flag Officer Farra- 



• WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 91 

gut, himself a Tennessean, with a powerful 
fleet, ran up the Mississippi, successfully passing 
the forts (Jackson and St. Philip) guarding its 
mouth, and reached New Orleans, which city 
was soon occupied by Butler (May ist), its fall 
being quickly followed by the fall of Pensacola. 
By this time all the important Florida seaport 
towns were in the possession of the Federal 
forces, and all these captures, except Roanoke 
Island and Newberne had been effected by the 
navy.* Thus, the Mississippi was open from its 
mouth to Port Hudson, and even that fort and 
the yet more threatening forts at Vicksburg could 
be passed by the Federal gunboats, though not 
without danger, which it was important to put 
an end to. The main object of attack now was 
Richmond. 

Thus, as the spring closed the Confederate 
Capital was menaced by an army which had 
cleared the Peninsula of its adversaries and was 
believed to be capable of taking Richmond 
whenever its general saw fit to deliver his assault. 
Feeling sure of it, McClellan approached leisure- 
ly up the north bank of the Chickahominy and 
entrenched his army in the positions he secured 
from time to time, until he was within sight of 
the spires of Richmond, and on quiet nights his 

*Ropes's " Story of the Civil War," pp. 182-5. 



92 ROBERT E. LEE 

pickets could hear the sound of the city's bells 
pealing the hours. McDowell, with 40,000 men, 
was on the Rappahannock, not seventy miles 
away, and was under stringent orders to effect 
a junction with McClellan, who, to get in touch 
with him and protect his base at West Point 
on the York, had reached out on the north 
side of the Chickahominy as far as Hanover 
Court House and the North Anna. Two armies, 
one under Banks in the Valley of Virginia, and 
the other under Fremont to the westward, were 
keeping Stonewall Jackson so fully engaged 
that he was making marches which gained for 
his infantry the appellation of "foot-cavalry," 
and to hold his own, he was forced to win two 
battles in one day. Johnston had, in face of 
McClellan's steady advance, fallen back on 
Richmond, and finding McClellan's army di- 
vided by the swollen Chickahominy had, on 
May 31st, attacked his left under Keyes at 
Seven Pines and driven him back to Fair Oaks, 
possibly missing a complete victory only by 
reason of Longstreet's slowness; then having 
been severely wounded he had been forced to 
leave the field, and next day a renewal of the 
attack under General G. W. Smith had resulted 
in a repulse. And in this crisis Lee was placed 
in command. 



WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 93 

The situation at Richmond, when in succes- 
sion to Johnston Lee was appointed in command 
of the army there on the ist day of June, was 
substantially this. The Confederate troops ly- 
ing between Richmond and McClellan's army 
numbered about 70,000 men. A steady retreat 
up the Peninsula had tended to impair their 
spirit if not their morale. The single check 
given to McClellan at Williamsburg had re- 
sulted in nothing more practical than to allow 
time for the retirement on Richmond, and to 
teach McClellan a wholesome lesson of respect 
for his enemy. The attack at Seven Pines, on 
the afternoon of May 31st, had been so gallantly 
pressed that it had resulted in a victory, but not 
the complete victory that had been expected; for 
owing to Longstreet's slowness and possibly to 
his half-heartedness, which on the 31st led him 
to wait until the afternoon before making the 
assault planned for the morning and thereby 
allowed Sumner to cross the falling Chicka- 
hominy and save Keyes, and on the next day 
led him to attack Sumner with only three bri- 
gades instead of his full force, the victory of the 
31st had been followed by the repulse at Fair 
Oaks next day, when General G. W. Smith 
commanded. In the same way, a few weeks 
later, as Henderson points out, he became 



94 ROBERT E. LEE 

responsible for the frontal battle of Malvern 
Hill. 

The capture of Norfolk, followed by the com- 
mand of the Peninsula, had opened the James 
River as high up as Drury's Bluff only a few 
miles below Richmond and had given Mc- 
Clellan command of the river to that point, 
thus opening to him two bases of supply on the 
York and the James respectively, accessible by 
water. 

The fortunes of the Confederacy in the West 
and along the seaboard, as we have seen, were 
at this time at a low ebb, and McClellan 
now was apparently sure of the capture of 
the Confederate Capital. Should it fall, Vir- 
ginia was likely to be overrun by the forces of 
the Union, and the principal seat of war would 
be the South or the West. McClellan's army 
numbered about 110,000 men, now well organ- 
ized and fairly seasoned; his equipment was as 
good as the world could furnish, and he believed 
himself, and he was believed to be, a young Na- 
poleon. McDowell's army composed of 40,000 
men, until a portion of it was sent to protect 
Washington, was at Fredericksburg, only sixty 
miles away, clamorous to join him, and under 
orders to do so, while already in the Shenan- 
doah Valley, or ready to march thither, was 



WHEN LEE TOOK COMMAND 95 

Fremont with 20,000 men, all operating to unite 
and fall on Richmond. 

Such, in brief, was the situation when Lee 
assumed command on June ist, 1862. His pres- 
tige at this time was far from being what it soon 
afterward became, or even what it had been 
previous to the outbreak of the war. His ability 
as an engineer was recognized; but the proof 
of a general is victories, and that proof he had 
not given. 



CHAPTER VII 

BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND 

T EE, thus called from the titular position of 
Military Adviser to the President* to the 
command of the army defending Richmond, to 
take the place of Johnston, found himself in 
command of about 80,000 men, 70,000 being 
close by, while McClellan had not less than 
1 10,000. From that moment the army felt a new 
hand and acknowledged its master. His first 
act was one which should dispel the delusion 
that he was great only in defensive operations. 
Massing his troops suddenly on the north 
side of the Chickahominy and caUing Stonewall 
Jackson from the Valley to meet him at a given 
point at a given hour, he fell upon McClellan's en- 
trenchments and rolled him back to the upland 
plain of Malvern Hill. Was it on the defensive 
or the offensive that he acted when he conceived 
and carried through to supreme success those 
masterly tactics ? Was he acting on the defen- 
sive or offensive when again, dashing upon him 

* June I, 1862. 

96 



BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND 97 

on the entrenched uplands of Malvern Hill, he 
swept him back to his gunboats, and shattered 
at once his plans and his prestige ? It was a 
battle fought as Grant fought at second Cold 
Harbor, mainly by frontal attack; and, like the 
plan of second Cold Harbor, has been criticised 
as costing needless waste of life. But, unlike 
Grant's futile and costly assaults, Malvern Hill, 
however bloody it was, proved successful. That 
night McClellan retreated to the shelter of his 
gunboats. Lee's audacious tactics saved Rich- 
mond. It was not until nearly three years had 
passed, and until hundreds of thousands of lives 
had been spent, and the seed-corn of the Confed- 
erate South had been ground in the ever-grind- 
ing mills of war, that a Union picket ever again 
got a glimpse of the spires of Richmond or any 
Union soldier, other than a prisoner of war, 
heard her church bells pealing in the quiet night. 
It had long been plain to Lee's clear vision that 
the best defence of Virginia's Capital was an 
offensive movement which should menace the 
Federal Capital, and as early as April 29th he 
had suggested to Stonewall Jackson, then operat- 
ing in the Valley of Virginia, a threatening 
counter-move, to prevent, if possible, McDowell 
from crossing the Rappahannock. Two weeks 
before the battle of Seven Pines he had again 



98 ROBERT E. LEE 

prompted Jackson to move on Banks, and, if 
successful, drive him back tov^ard the Potomac 
and create the impression that he intended to 
threaten that Hne, a movement in v^hich Jackson 
v^as completely successful. Thus, Lee had, 
v^ith the aid of his able Lieutenant, stopped the 
armies of Fremont and McDow^ell from any 
attempt to reinforce McClellan, and v^as ready 
w^hen the moment came to carry out his far- 
reaching plan to defeat and possibly destroy 
by one sv^^ift blov^ McClellan's great army now 
lying at the gates of Richmond and holding both 
sides of the Chickahominy. 

It is no part of the plan of this book to discuss 
in detail Lee's consummate tactics; but a bare 
outHne of his far-seeing plan is necessary. 

Johnston had attacked on the south side of 
the Chickahominy and failed to dislodge Mc- 
Clellan. What v^ould Lee do ^ His first act 
was to retire his army to the original position 
held before the assault at Seven Pines and fortify 
on the south bank of the Chickahominy, to secure 
that side of the river while he prepared for his 
coup on the north bank against McClellan's 
right wing, commanded by the gallant Fitz John 
Porter. Thus, he had as his first move with- 
drawn his army even nearer Richmond than 
before. But he had no idea of remaining 



BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND 99 

there idle while McClellan prepared to dis- 
lodge him. To secure accurate information 
he dispatched Stuart with a small force (about 
1,200 cavalry and a battery of horse artil- 
lery)* to investigate around his right flank, and 
the dashing cavalry leader swept entirely around 
McClellan's army in a ride that gave him fame 
the world over and placed him forever among 
the great cavalry captains of History.f Next, 
Jackson was instructed to strike a blow in the 
Valley which skould startle Washington, and, 
while they were still dazed, to hasten and join 
Lee on the Chickahominy, and with his veter- 
ans act as Lee's left wing in a blow on McClel- 
lan's right, which should drive him from before 
Richmond. To make sure of this as well as to 
lull McClellan to a sense of security, several 
brigades were sent somewhat ostentatiously to 
Jackson; but time appeared so important that 
Jackson was summoned to join him without 
waiting for a stroke in the Valley, and putting 
his troops in motion the General rode ahead to 
Richmond to learn the details of Lee's plans 
and then rode back to hurry forward his troops, 
already pushing on by forced marches toward 
the field where, by Lee's brilliant plan, the as- 

* Walter H. Taylor's " General Lee," p. 58. 
t Henderson's " Stonewall Jackson." 



100 ROBERT E. LEE 

sault was to be delivered at dawn on the 26th 
by his combined forces.* 

With Jackson up, Lee's army numbered about 
80,000 men.f His plan briefly was for Jackson, 
with his veterans, to advance at crack of day 
on June 26th, with Stuart on his left, and turn 
the long right wing of McClellan's army, under 
Porter, posted at Mechanicsville, in a strong 
position, commanding the turnpike across the 
Chickahominy, with Beaver Dam Creek and its 
upland behind it; for Branch's Brigade, facing 
Porter, to keep in touch with Jackson and on his 
advance to cross the Chickahominy and rejoin 
his commander A. P. Hill; for A. P. Hill, as 
soon as he knew Jackson was engaged, to cross 
the Chickahominy at the Meadow Bridge and 
force the crossing of the Chickahominy at the 
Mechanicsville Bridge; for Longstreet to cross 
to the support of A. P. Hill and for D. H. Hill, 
to cross to the support of Jackson; meanwhile 
Magruder and Huger were to hold the defences 
on the south side of the Chickahominy and 
keep McClellan's main army well occupied. 

Lee's plan was the consummation of audac- 
ity, for it would leave only 25,000 men to con- 
front and hold McClellan's left wing and centre 

* Walter H. Taylor's "General Lee," p. 60. 
t Ibid., p. 62. 



BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND loi 

on the south bank of the Chickahominy, while 
he assaulted his right wing on the north bank 
with his main army. The time fixed for the 
assault was based on Jackson's conviction that 
he could be up and ready to attack at daylight 
on the 26th of June. But for once in his life 
Jackson was not "up." He was to have been 
at the Slash Church near Ashland on the 25th, 
and was to bivouac near the Central Railway 
(now the Chesapeake and Ohio), ready to 
march at three o'clock on the morning of the 
26th on the road to Pole Green Church to 
deliver the assault which was to be the signal to 
A. P. Hill to cross the Chickahominy. But it 
was not until late that afternoon that he was 
able to reach the neighbourhood of the field of 
battle, where the fight had been raging for sev- 
eral hours, and even then he did not attack, but 
halted and lay with the roar of the guns to his 
right distinctly audible. 

A. P. Hill having waited all day for news 
of Jackson, finally, fearful that the whole 
plan might miscarry, moved at three o'clock, 
crossed the Chickahominy at Meadow Bridge 
and carried the stoutly defended position 
of Mechanicsville, several miles below, and 
pushing forward, assaulted furiously, but in 
vain, the strongly defended position beyond 



102 ROBERT E. LEE 

Beaver Dam Creek. That night, McClellan 
retired his left wing to his second Kne above 
Powhite Creek, Gaines's Mill and Cold Har- 
bor. And here Lee attacked him again, and, 
after terrific fighting, defeated him in the furi- 
ous battle of Gaines's Mill and Cold Harbor, 
seizing his position; capturing his line of com- 
munication to West Point, and driving him 
across the Chickahominy, forced him to aban- 
don his threatening position on its south side 
and fall back across White Oak Swamp to Mal- 
vern Hill some miles to the rear. It was a bril- 
liant stroke for Lee to have massed 50,000 men 
on the north bank of the Chickahominy and 
crushed McClellan's right wing, while he held 
the rest of his army with only 25,000 men, and 
had Jackson attacked on the morning of the 
26th, as planned, or possibly even on the morn- 
ing of the 27th, the victory might have been yet 
more decisive.* But it was necessary to do 
more to drive McClellan back from before 
Richmond. 

On the 28th Lee held his army in hand, 
watchful to see which way McClellan, after his 
staggering blow, would move, whether by the 
way he had come, up the Peninsula, or toward 
the James, and as soon as it became apparent 

* Taylor's " General Lee," pp. 68-78. 



BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND 103 

what he would do, ordered his troops to the 
south side of the Chickahominy and proceeded 
to attack again at Savage Station on the 29th, 
and at White Oak Swamp and Frazier's Farm 
on the 30th, carrying every position except one, 
which was held with heroic constancy until 
night-fall and then abandoned. The failure of 
some of his lieutenants to grasp the situation 
prevented the complete success of his plans, 
and McClellan got safely across White Oak 
Swamp. On July ist Lee found McClellan en- 
trenched in a formidable position on the up- 
lands of Malvern Hill, and again flung himself 
upon him with immense loss to his own army, 
but with the result of forcing him to abandon 
his position and retreat precipitately by night to 
the shelter of his gunboats at Harrison's Land- 
ing. 

Thus, Lee had, with less than 80,000 men, 
by his audacious tactics and masterly handling 
of his troops, defeated McClellan with more 
than 105,000 men, and driven him from posi- 
tion after position, relieving Richmond from 
what had appeared imminent danger of im- 
mediate capture. 

Military critics have often wondered why 
Jackson, who both before and after the seven 
days' fighting around Richmond, proved him- 



104 ROBERT E. LEE 

self the most eager, prompt and aggressive lieu- 
tenant that any commander had during the 
war, should apparently have been so slow in the 
execution of the plan entrusted to him in this 
critical movement. Old soldiers, who followed 
and adored him, still discuss the mysterious 
failure, and admit that "Old Jack" was "not 
himself" at this crisis. 

An explanation has been given that he mis- 
took the road leading toward the field of Cold. 
Harbor, and missed his way. 

The writer, as a resident of that region, 
familiar with the country and with the dis- 
cussion of the facts, ventures to suggest a 
simple explanation. As is known, Jackson, 
after a brilliant but arduous campaign in 
the Shenandoah Valley, moved his troops 
from the Valley of Virginia along the line 
of the Virginia Central Railway, marching 
some and conveying some on the few railway 
trains he could procure, and when the latter 
were far enough ahead of those who were 
marching, he detrained them and set them to 
marching, sending the trains back to bring up 
the others and take them on ahead some dis- 
tance, when they were in turn detrained and 
sent forward. 

The distance from the Valley to the Chicka- 



BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND 105 

hominy being about 130 miles, the bringing 
forward of his troops, even with the indifferent 
assistance of his trains, occupied several days: 
and the General himself, with a staff officer or 
two, at a point some sixty odd miles west of 
Richmond, left the train and rode to Richmond 
to consult with Lee as to details, and, as I be- 
lieve, to familiarize himself somewhat with the 
roads, which through Hanover are very confus- 
ing. It is of record that he then thought he 
could be .up and ready to co-operate with Hill 
on the 25th, but General Longstreet claims 
that he urged that this was impossible and 
that if not the 27th, at the earliest the 26th 
should be set for the attack, which was agreed 
to. At Beaver Dam Station, on the Rail- 
way forty miles from Richmond, the last troops 
were taken from the train, and, together with 
those who had been marching the day be- 
fore, took the road for Richmond by way of 
Honeyman's Bridge over the Little River, and 
then, owing to high water in the South Anna, 
instead of taking the shorter route by Ground- 
squirrel Bridge they marched byway of Ashland. 
From Little River to the field of Cold Harbor, 
the roads are deep with sand, water is scant, 
and in the blazing days of late June the prog- 
ress of the troops was much slower than had 



io6 ROBERT E. LEE 

been reckoned on, and the move took nearly a 
day longer than had been counted on. Mean- 
while, Jackson, who had left his train and ridden 
sixty odd miles to Richmond to confer with 
Lee, rode straight back to bring his men for- 
ward, met them at a point more than fifty miles 
from Richmond, and returned with them. 
Thus, when he reached the slashes of Hanover, 
he had been in the saddle almost continuously 
for several days and nights, and was completely 
broken down.* 

Members of a troop of cavalry, known as the 
Hanover troop, (Company C, 4th Virginia 
Cavalry) who came from that region, were 
detailed to act as guides for the troops, and 
the man detailed to guide Jackson,f on reaching 
the neighborhood of the battlefield, found so 
many new roads cut by McClellan's troops, 
and so many familiar landmarks gone, that 
he became confused, and led the column-some 
distance on the wrong road before discover- 
ing his error. It then became necessary to re- 
trace their way; but marching the other troops 
back and turning around the artillery in the 

* I remember as a boy seeing Jackson's columns passing down 
the road near my home in Hanover, some fifteen miles above 
Ashland, and every hour or so the men were made to lie down full 
length on the ground to rest. 

t Lincoln Sydnor. 



BATTLES AROUND RICHMOND 107 

narrow road, bordered by forest and thickets, 
much time was lost. Ewell, who was pres- 
ent, threatened to hang the guide; but Jack- 
son intervened, and bade him guide them 
back.* 

However it was, Lee reHeved Richmond, and 
the war, from being based on the issue of a 
single campaign, was now a matter of years 
and treasure. 

The results of the battles around Richmond 
were summed up by Lee as follows: 

In his General Order (No. 75, dated July 
7, 1862), tendering his "warmest thanks and 
congratulations to the army by whose valor such 
splendid results were achieved," he says, "On 
Monday, June 26th, the powerful and thor- 
oughly equipped army of the enemy was in- 
trenched in works vast in extent and most 
formidable in character, within sight of our 
capital. 

"To-day the remains of that confident and 
threatening host lie upon the banks of the 

* The fact of Jackson's complete prostration is mentioned in a 
letter written at the time by his aide de camp, the gallant Lt. Col. 
Alexander S. Pendleton, killed later at Fisher's Hill. The other 
circumstances I had stated to me in a letter from A. R. Ellerson, 
Esquire, a member of the Hanover troop, whose home was near 
Mechanicsville, and who was with Sydnor at Jackson's head- 
quarters and was sent with dispatches from General Lee. See 
Appendix B. 



io8 ROBERT E. LEE 

James River, thirty miles from Richmond, 
seeking to recover, under the protection of his 
gunboats, from the effects of a series of disas- 
trous defeats. 

"The immediate fruits of your success are 
the rehef of Richmond from a state of siege, 
the routing of the great army that so long 
menaced its safety, many thousand prisoners 
including officers of high rank, the capture or 
destruction of stores to the value of millions, 
and the acquisition of thousands of arms and 
fifty-one pieces of superior artillery." 

He concludes, after a tribute to the "gallant 
dead vs^ho died nobly in defence of their coun- 
try's freedom," "Soldiers, your country will 
thank you for the heroic conduct you have dis- 
played — conduct v^orthy of men engaged in a 
cause so just and sacred, and deserving a na- 
tion's gratitude and praise." 



CHAPTER VIII 

LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND 

T T A VINO assumed the offensive and won 
signal success, Lee was not a general to lose 
the fruit of his victory, and be forced back into a 
defensive position the perils of which he well 
knew. McClellan was routed and driven back 
to the shelter of his gunboats; but he was still 
within little more than a day's march of Rich- 
mond with an army which, though demorahzed, 
was, in its position, still formidable. And he 
could at any time cross to the South bank of 
the James and attack Richmond from that side, 
and threaten the cutting off of communication 
with the South by the chief line of communica- 
tion, the Richmond and Danville Railway, a 
move he urgently recommended, but as to which 
he was overruled by Halleck and the authorities 
in Washington.* McDowell, too, a gallant soldier 
and gentleman, was still at Fredericksburg and 
hungry for a chance to atone for his disaster at 
Bull Run, and Pope, with another army greater 

* Ropes, II, p. 238. 

. 109 



no ROBERT E. LEE 

than Lee could send against him, was advancing 
across the Piedmont, dating his letters from 
"Headquarters in the saddle," and boasting that 
he never saw anything but the backs of his ene- 
mies.* If he should seize the Virginia Central 
Railroad he would destroy an important avenue 
with the southwest, and the one avenue of com- 
munication with the Valley of Virginia. If he 
should unite with McClellan the South would be 
lost. The situation was not a whit less critical 
than it had been on the ist of June, when Mc- 
Clellan was advancing by approaches to shell 
Richmond. 

But Lee was of all men the man to meet the 
situation. It might well be said of him as Conde 
and Turenne said of Merci, that he never lost a 
favorable moment, or failed to anticipate their 
most secret designs, as if he had assisted in their 
councils. 

Let those who rank General Lee among the 
defensive captains say whether he acted on the 
defensive or offensive when, leaving only some 
twenty thousand men to guard Richmond, with 
McClellan still at Harrison's Landing, hurry- 
ing troops now to the South side of the James, 
now to Malvern Hill, he, with rare audacity, 

*Pope gave his force as 43,000. Taylor's "General Lee," 
p. 86. 



LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND in 

turned on Pope advancing across the Pied- 
mont, and sent Jackson to strike him beyond 
the Rapidan, and then, after the first stroke at 
Cedar Mountain, sweeping around in a great 
half-circle through Thoroughfare Gap, struck 
him at Groveton a staggering blow, and facing 
him on the rolling plain of Manassas, routed 
and drove him back to the shelter of the forts 
around Alexandria, and with his army, ill-clad 
and ill-shod, so threatened the national capital 
that McClellan was hastily recalled from the 
James to its defence. 

The manner of it was this: 

After a rest of about ten days, spent In watching 
McClellan, who from time to time was moving 
troops up to Malvern Hill, or across the James, 
Lee addressed his attention to Pope, sending 
Jackson with his veterans, his old division of four 
brigades and Ewell's division of three brigades, to 
Gordonsville, and supporting him with A. P. 
Hill's division a little later, while with the remain- 
der of his depleted army he covered Richmond. 
The eflPect of this bold movement was what he 
anticipated. On the 9th of August, Jackson at- 
tacked and defeated his old opponent, Banks's 
corps at Cedar Run, and then withdrew toward 
Gordonsville to avoid the attack by Pope's entire 
army until Lee should be ready to reinforce 



112 ROBERT E. LEE 

him. On the 14th of August, McClellan received 
orders from Washington to withdraw his army from 
the Peninsula for the protection of the National 
Capital. On the 13th day of August, Lee having 
matured his plans and feeling secure as to Rich- 
mond, ordered Longstreet with Hood to Gordons- 
ville, sending thither also Stuart and R. H. 
Anderson, and on the 19th issued his order for 
attack on the 20th. He had thus massed quickly 
some 54,000 men ready for his stroke, leaving 
only two brigades for the defence of Richmond. 
But President Davis wrote him, "Confidence 
in you overcomes the view which would other- 
wise be taken.* In the interval, however, Pope, 
who occupied the line of the Rapidan, hav- 
ing captured Stuart's Adjutant General f with a 
letter on his person from General Lee to General 
Stuart, setting forth his plans and making mani- 
fest to Pope his position and force and his deter- 
mination to overwhelm the army under Pope be- 
fore it could be reinforced by the Army of the Po- 
tomac, withdrew hastily behind the Rappahannock, 
which accident Stuart offset partially a few days 
later when, in a night attack at Catlett's station, 
he captured Pope's headquarters and effects, in- 

* Ropes's "Story of the Civil War," II, p. 254. Col. Wm. 
Allen, p. 199, n. 18 W. R., 928, 945. 
t Major Fitzhugh. Pope's report. 



LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND 113 

eluding his dispatch-book, containing impor- 
tant information throwing Hght on the strength, 
movements and designs of the enemy and dis- 
closing General Pope's own views against his 
ability to defend the line of the Rappahannock.* 
This "fortunate accident" of the capture of 
Lee's letter containing his plans saved Pope for 
the time being, and he hastily withdrew behind 
the Rappahannock, thereby preventing the 
cutting off of his army from his base of supplies 
as Lee had planned. "This retreat," says R.opes 
in his history of the campaign, "was made not 
a day too soon. Pope's army had been, in truth, 
in an extremely dangerous position. . . . All 
this is very plain, but apparently it was not seen 
by General Pope until the capture of one of the 
officers of Stuart's staff put him in possession of 
Lee's orders to his army." f "Lee was greatly 
disappointed at Pope's escape," continues this 
able critic,} and he proceeds to show how, had 
Pope not retreated precipitately, he "would 
have been attacked in flank and rear and his 
communications severed into the bargain." 
"Doubtless," he adds, "he would have made a 
strenuous fight, but defeat under such circum- 

* General Stuart's report, cited in Taylor's " General Lee." 
t Ropes's "Story of the Civil War," pp. 256-257. 
t Lee to Jackson, July 23, 1862, W. R., 916. 



114 ROBERT E. LEE 

stances might well have been ruin. From this 
disaster Fortune saved Pope through the capt- 
ure of Stuart's staff officer." * 

Even thus, Lee determined to attack Pope 
beyond the Rappahannock, and Jackson was 
sent up the stream to cross beyond him at Sul- 
phur Springs and turn his right. A great rain, 
however, raised the river suddenly after he had 
sent a brigade or two across, leaving them iso- 
lated and preventing their relief for several 
days. This rain, in Ropes's opinion saved Pope, 
who was now strictly on the defensive and was 
being encouraged by Halleck to "fight like the 
devil." t 

It was after five days spent in trying to reach 
Pope*s right beyond the swollen Rappahannock, 
that Lee put in operation his famous flank 
movement, by which, holding Pope's front with 
half his force, he despatched Jackson with a 
part of Stuart's cavalry to circle quite around 
Pope's right and crossing the Bull Run Moun- 
tains at Thoroughfare Gap, strike his line of 
communication in his rear. Considering that 
Pope had under him, on the Rappahannock, an 
army which, making allowance for all losses, 
"numbered upward of 70,000, when Lee under- 

* Ropes's, II, pp. 257-258. 

f Ropes's, II, pp. 259-260, 16. W. R., 56-57. 



LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND 115 

took this novel and perilous operation," one 
may well agree with Ropes that "the dis- 
parity between this force and that of Jack- 
son is so enormous that it is impossible not to 
be amazed at the audacity of the Confederate 
General." * 

Lee, however, was now assured of the with- 
drawal of McClellan's army as a consequence of 
his audacious strategy in threatening Washing- 
ton, and having massed his forces in the Piedmont 
with a view to attacking Pope in his position 
along the Rappahannock, he proceeded to carry 
out his plans, however "novel and perilous," 
undisturbed by any forebodings. Sending Jack- 
son up the now swollen stream to find a 
crossing-place well beyond Pope's right, and 
Longstreet after him to demonstrate in Pope's 
front and follow Jackson at the proper time, he 
awaited confidently the result of his audacious 
plan. Starting from Jefferson and crossing the 
river at a point four miles above Waterloo, on 
the morning of August 25th, Jackson marched 
twenty-five miles a day, bivouacked at Salem, 
and pushing forward with "his accustomed 
vigor and celerity," crossed the Bull Run 
Mountains at Thoroughfare Gap and about 
nightfall, on the 26th, while Pope thought he 

* Ropes's, II, pp. 261-262. Allen, 212-213. 



ii6 ROBERT E. LEE 

was headed for the Valley of the Shenandoah,* 
struck the railway at Bristow Station between 
Pope and the city he was supposed to be cover- 
ing. At Gainesville, on the day after he started, 
he was joined by Stuart with two brigades of cav- 
alry, flushed with the recent victory of Kelly's 
Ford. He despatched Stuart that night to capture 
Manassas Junction with its vast stores for 
Pope's army, which was successfully accom- 
plished, and next morning, leaving Ewell to 
guard Bristow Station, he proceeded to Ma- 
nassas, where he was joined later by Ewell, 
who had been forced back from Bristow Station 
after a sharp fight, and who brought the informa- 
tion that Pope had turned on him with his full 
force. That morning Pope had issued orders to 
abandon the line of the Rappahannock.f This 
was on the night of the 27th, and the morning 
of the 28th. 

That same night Pope issued orders for his 
entire army to concentrate at or near Manassas 
Junction and a manifesto that he would "bag 
the whole crowd." Jackson, therefore, moved 
to the westward of the turnpike and took a po- 
sition near Groveton, where he could await 
Longstreet's arrival by way of Thoroughfare 

* 18, W. R., 653, 665. 

t 16, W. R., 34, 70. Ropes's, II, p. 266. 



LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND 117 

Gap, or himself retire through the Gap should 
necessity arise. 

On the afternoon of the 28th, Jackson, lying 
near Groveton, almost surrounded by Pope's 
army, learned that a large force was moving 
down the turnpike toward Centreville, where 
Pope had finally determined to concentrate. 
This was King's division of McDowell's com- 
mand. He immediately sprang upon them, and 
the result was one of the most obstinately con- 
tested of the minor fields of the war.* That 
night the Federals withdrew and next day it was 
known that Pope "had taken a position to 
cover Washington against Jackson's advance." 
Jackson posted himself in a defensive position 
partially protected by the line of an unfinished 
railway extending northeastwardly from the 
Warrenton Turnpike, and awaited Longstreet, 
(with whom was Lee himself), who, having been 
relieved by R. H. Anderson, had crossed the 
river at Hinson's Mill, the same point where 
Jackson had crossed several days before, and 
was pushing forward for Thoroughfare Gap, 
which he reached on the afternoon of the 28th 
and, finding it in possession of the enemy, was 
forced to carry by assault. As Longstreet's com- 

* Allen, 231, Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson," II, 179, 235. 
Ropes's, II, 272. 



ii8 ROBERT E. LEE 

mand emerged from the gap next morning (29th) 
the sound of the guns toward Manassas told that 
the battle was on. Pushing forward by Gaines- 
ville, Longstreet moved to Jackson's right, where 
Sigel was striving to hold Jackson in check until 
Pope could concentrate his full force to destroy 
him. Other corps were soon put in and for 
hours the battle raged "with incessant fury and 
varying success, but Jackson stubbornly held 
his ground, though the fighting was often hand 
to hand and the bayonet was in constant requi- 
sition." * In all this fighting Longstreet took 
little part, though Lee himself three times ex- 
pressed his wish that he should attack and thus 
relieve the hard-pressed Jackson. As General 
Lee did not positively order him in, he deter- 
mined to wait and attack next day should a 
weak place be found in the enemy's lines, and 
he left Jackson and Hill to hold their position 
alone except for the aid afforded them by a recon- 
naissance in force by three gallant brigades — 
Hood's and Evans's with Wilcox in support. The 
command of Fitz John Porter numbering some 
10,000 men, lay near Gainesville, deployed to 
engage any force in their front and Longstreet 
thought the enemy was marching on him from 
the rear and failed to press in to Jackson's aid. 

* Taylor's " General Lee," p. io6. 



LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND 119 

Thus Porter fully performed his task.* Fort- 
unately for Lee, he knew that Pope thought he 
was in a perilous position and was anxious only 
to escape, and he disposed his troops to take 
advantage of this erroneous view, which he did 
completely. Pope, who claimed to have won 
the battle of the evening before, was obsessed 
with the idea that Jackson was in full retreat 
and he massed his army to destroy or "bag" 
him, giving McDowell the "general charge of 
the pursuit.'' It was afternoon of the following 
day (the 30th) before Pope's gallant lines ad- 
vanced to the attack along the Warrenton Pike, 
with Porter leading against Jackson's front in 
such force that Jackson called on Lee for rein- 
forcements. Lee immediately ordered General 
Longstreet in. The fighting was from this time 
furious. Line after line came on under the 
leaden sleet with a courage which aroused the 
admiration of their antagonists and called for 
the utmost exertion to repel them. But mortal 
flesh could not stand against the deadly rain of 
shot and shell poured down on the brigades 
"piling up against Jackson's right, centre and 
left" f and they melted away in the fiery fur- 
nace. "Their repeated efforts to rally were," as 

* Ropes's, II, 281. 

t See Report: Taylor's '' General Lee," pp. 112-113. 



120 ROBERT E. LEE 

Lee reported, "unavailing, and Jackson's troops, 
being thus relieved from the pressure of over- 
whelming numbers, began to press steadily for- 
ward, driving the enemy before them." As they 
retreated in confusion, "Longstreet anticipat- 
ing the order for a general advance, now threw 
his whole command against the Federal centre 
and left, and the whole line swept steadily on, 
driving the enemy with great carnage from each 
successive position." 

Thus by Lee's "novel and perilous move- 
ment, "carried out to complete success, was won 
the great battle of Second Manassas, which 
completed the campaign by which he relieved 
Richmond. 

During the night Pope withdrew to the north 
side of Bull Run and occupied a strong position 
on the heights about Centreville. But by this 
time the hunter had become the hunted. Lee, 
driving for the fruits of his dearly won victory, 
ordered Jackson to push forward around Pope's 
right, while Longstreet engaged him in front, 
and Pope, now thoroughly demoralized, retired 
first on Fairfax Court House and after a sharp 
engagement with Jackson at Chantilly, to the 
secure shelter of the formidable forts at Alex- 
andria. Thus, Lee, with 50,000 men had routed 
and drawn Pope from his menacing position 



LEE RELIEVES RICHMOND 121 

with 62,000, or as Ropes states 70,000 men, as gal- 
lant as any soldiers in the world, captured more 
than 9,000 prisoners; thirty pieces of artillery, 
upward of 20,000 stand of small arms, numerous 
colors, and a large amount of stores.* 

It was a proof of Pope's utter demoralization 
that he telegraphed that unless something were 
"done to restore the tone of his army, it would 
melt away," and that he attacked, as the cause 
of his disaster, the gallant Fitz John Porter, 
with a vehemence which might better have been 
employed on the field of Manassas, and placed 
on this fine soldier and honorable gentleman 
a stigma which it took a generation to extirpate. 

Such was the fruit of Lee's bold generalship, 
and he was now to give a yet further proof of his 
audacity and skill. 

* Lee's report cited in Taylor's "General Lee," p. 117. The 
Federal losses were 1,738 killed, and 10,135 wounded. Con- 
federate losses, 1,090 killed, and 6,154 wounded. Pope had over 
70,000 men. See Ropes's, cited ante. 



CHAPTER IX 

LEE'S AUDACITY— ANTIETAM AND 
CHANCELLORSVILLE 

T EE'S move against Pope was not merely the 
boldest, and possibly the most masterly piece 
of strategy in the whole war; it was, as has been 
well said, "one of the most brilliant and daring 
movements in the history of wars." But he did 
not pause to enjoy his victory. His army was 
well-nigh shoeless, and the South was unable to 
help him. Need became the handmaid of strat- 
egy. He was nearer to Washington than to 
Richmond. Maryland lay the other side of 
Pope's army. He would place that army and 
the other armies also between him and Rich- 
mond. He determined to march around Pope's 
army and invade Maryland to subsist his army 
and relieve Virginia, and to give Maryland the 
power to join the Southern Confederacy, which 
it was believed she longed to do. Again circling 
around to the westward, he dispatched Jackson 
to capture Harper's Ferry and pushed on into 
Maryland. It had been hoped that Maryland 



LEE'S AUDACITY 123 

would rise and declare for the South. Mary- 
land did not respond. This, however, was not 
the cause of his failure. That he did not reap 
the full fruits of this wonderful generalship was 
due to one of those strange events, which, so 
insignificant in itself, yet under Him who, 

''Views with equal eye as God of All, 
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall," 

is fateful to decide the issues of nations. As the 
capture of his letter and plans had given Pope 
warning and led him to retire his army behind 
the Rappahannock, so now an even stranger 
fate befell him. A copy of his dispatch giving 
his entire plan, was picked up on the site of a 
camp formerly occupied by D. H. Hill, wrapped 
about a handful of cigars, and promptly reached 
McClellan, thus betraying to him a plan which 
but for this strange accident, might have re- 
sulted in the complete overthrow of his army, 
and even in the capture of the National capital, 
and enabling him with his vast resources, to 
frustrate it. A man's carelessness usually reacts 
mainly upon himself, but few incidents in the 
history of the world have ever been fraught with 
such fateful consequences as that act of the un- 
known staff-officer or courier, who chose Lee's 
plan of battle as a wrapping for his tobacco. 



124 ROBERT E. LEE 

"If we always had exact information of our 
enemy's dispositions," said Frederick, "we 
should beat him every time." This exact in- 
formation this strange mishap gave Lee's ad- 
versary on the eve of Antietam. Even so, Lee, 
who fought the battle with only 35,000 men, 
came off with more glory than his antagonist, 
who had 87,000,* as gallant men, moreover, as 
ever braved death, and the latter was a little 
later removed by his Government as a failure, 
while Lee stood higher than ever in the affection 
and esteem of the South. 

Lee's order was discovered and delivered to 
McClellan on the 13th, and McClellan at once 
set himself to the task of meeting the situation 
by relieving Harper's Ferry on the one hand 
and crushing Lee's army in detail among the 
passes of the Maryland Spurs. Lee, however, 
had, through the good offices of a friendly citi- 
zen who had been present at or had learned of 
the delivery of his dispatch to McClellan, soon 
become aware of the misfortune that had be- 
fallen him, and while McClellan was preparing 
to destroy him, he was taking prompt measures 
to repair the damage as fully as possible. He 

* General Lee told Fitz Lee that he fought the battle of Sharps- 
burg with 35,000 troops. And McClellan reported that he him- 
self had 87,164 troops. — (Fitzhugh Lee's "Life of Lee," p. 209.) 
C/. also Ropes's, "Story of the Civil War," II, pp. 376-377- 



LEE'S AUDACITY 125 

instantly recalled Longstreet from Hagerstown, 
ordered Hill back to Turner's Gap and Stuart 
to Crampton Gap, to defend it against McClel- 
lan's expected advance, a disposition which de- 
layed the enemy until the evening of the 14th, 
w^hen, after fierce fighting, they carried both 
positions, forcing McLaws back from Cramp- 
ton Gap to Pleasant Valley, across which, how- 
ever, he established "a. formidable line of de- 
fence." Lee was thus forced either to retreat 
across the Potomac, or to fight where he had 
not contemplated fighting. He seems to have 
wavered momentarily which course to adopt, 
and well he might waver. It was a perilous situa- 
tion. He had with him, when the gaps were 
stormed on the afternoon of the 14th, only about 
19,000 men in all,* "while the main army of 
McClellan was close upon him." He issued an 
order that night (8 p. m.) to McLaws to cross the 
Potomac below Shepherdstown, leaving the ford 
at Shepherdstown for the main army to take. 
" But in less than two hours Lee had changed his 
mind, — why we are not informed — " says 
Ropes, " and had determined to await battle 
north of the Potomac." By midnight he had 
planned his battle; he had ordered the cavalry 
to pilot McLaws over the mountains and across 

* Ropes's "Story of the Civil War," II, p. 347. 



126 ROBERT E. LEE 

country to Sharpsburg, where he had deter- 
mined to make his stand on the east of Antie- 
tam creek. He had also taken measures to 
bring up his other troops as rapidly as possible. 
"This decision," says Ropes, "to stand and 
fight at Sharpsburg, which General Lee took 
on the evening of the 14th of September — just 
after his troops had been driven from the South 
Mountain passes — is beyond controversy one of 
the boldest and most hazardous decisions in his 
whole military career. It is, in truth, so bold 
and hazardous that one is bewildered that he 
could even have thought seriously of mak- 
ing it."* 

Lee*s decision was, indeed, so bold and hazard- 
ous that the thoughtful Ropes suggests that he 
must have been influenced by fear of loss of his 
military prestige. "General Lee, however," he 
admits, "thought there was a fair chance for 
him to win a victory over McClellan," f and 
he adds that "naturally he did not consider 
them (McClellan's troops) as good as his own, 
and it is without doubt that they did not con- 
stitute so good an army as that which he com- 
manded." 

We know, however, that while Longstreet 

* Ropes's, "Story of the Civil War," II, p. 349. 
t Ropes's, "Story of the Civil War," p. 351-352. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 127 

(as usual) suggested the obstacles and dangers 
of the situation, Jackson approved the action of 
Lee both before and after the battle.* 

On the night of the 14th, General Lee with- 
drew his army across Antietam creek and as- 
sumed a position which he thought stronger, 
along a range of hills on the east side of the 
Hagerstown turnpike with his right resting on 
Antietam creek and his left refused across the 
turnpike some three miles to the northward, 
this pike being a line of communication be- 
tween the two wings by which he could sup- 
port either when hard pressed. Thus, he waited 
for Jackson, who, on the same day, captured 
Harper's Ferry with its garrison, munitions 
and stores, and leaving A. P. Hill in charge, 
set out in haste to reinforce Lee, who was 
confronting McClellan's great army of 75,000 
men with only 19,000 men and about 125 
guns.f 

McClellan's army with whom Lee's cavalry 
had been effectively skirmishing, appeared in 
his front in the early afternoon, and Ropes de- 
clares, that it was an "unique opportunity" that 
was offered the Union general. McClellan, 
however, still believed that Lee had at least 

* Lee's Letter to Mrs. Jackson, January 15, 1866. 
t Ropes's, II, pp. 354-355- 



128 ROBERT E. LEE 

100,000 men under his command, and he knew 
how ably that army, whatever its numbers, was 
commanded. Moreover, he beHeved that his 
own army was still not fully recovered from the 
demoralization it had suffered from under Pope. 
He was, therefore, inclined to be cautious. Ac- 
cordingly, it was not until next day that he 
made any demonstrations against Lee. Mean- 
time, on the morning of the i6th, Jackson ar- 
rived with all of his army who could march, 
between 8,000 and 9,000 m.en in all, the re- 
mainder of them, barefooted and lame, being 
left behind. But these, alike with those who 
could march, were flushed with victory. Lee's 
troops were disposed with Longstreet command- 
ing his right and Jackson his left, with Hood 
in support, while McClellan, in disposing his 
forces had placed Hooker on his extreme right 
with the first corps, Sumner next on his right, 
with two corps, the 2d and 12th, then Porter 
with the 5th corps, occupying his centre and 
Burnside on the left with the 9th corps, good 
troops and bravely led. That afternoon, in 
pursuance of McClellan's plan. Hooker was or- 
dered to cross the Antietam and assault Lee's 
left, and crossing the stream his corps assaulted 
the portion of the line led by Hood, but was 
"gallantly repulsed." The only eflTect of this 



LEE'S AUDACITY 129 

assault is declared by Ropes to have been the 
disclosure of McClellan's plans.* 

The real battle of Sharpsburg, however, was 
fought on the 17th, and was the bloodiest battle 
of the war, a battle in which intrepid courage 
marked both sides, shining alike in the furious 
charges of the men who assaulted Lee's lines 
and the undaunted constancy of the men who 
defended them. It began early in the morning 
with an attack by Hooker's corps, the first 
shock falling on Ewell's division in Jackson's 
wing, and within the bloody hour of the first 
onslaught. General J. R. Jones, commanding 
Jackson's old division, was borne from the field 
to be followed immediately by Starke, who suc- 
ceeded him in command, mortally wounded. 
"Colonel Douglass, commanding Lawton's bri- 
gade, was killed. General Lawton, command- 
ing division and Colonel Walker, commanding 
brigade, were severely wounded. More than 
half of the brigades of Lawton and Hays were 
either killed or wounded, and more than a third 
of Trimble's, and all of the regimental command- 
ers in those brigades, except two, were killed or 
wounded. f In this extremity. Hood's brigades 
and three of D. H. Hill's brigades were rushed 

* Ropes's, II, pp. 358-359- 

t Ropes's, II, p. 359, citing Jackson's Report, 27 W. R., 956. 



130 ROBERT E. LEE 

to the front In support of the exhausted divisions 
of Jones and Lawton, and after an hour of furi- 
ous fighting, Hooker's force, led by himself with 
Doubleday, Ricketts and Meade, gallant com- 
manders of gallant divisions, were beaten off, 
with Hooker himself wounded and over 2,500 
men dead or wounded. It was a terrific opening 
of a terrific day. As they retired, Mansfield's 
corps came in on their left, and in the furious 
onslaught on the already shattered brigades of 
D. H. Hill and Hood, bore them back across the 
turnpike, ''with a loss of some 1,700 men out 
of the 7,000 brought into action, and an even 
heavier loss on the Confederate side. But be- 
yond the turnpike the remnants of Jones's 
division under Grigsby, reinforced by Early, 
who had succeeded the wounded Lawton in 
command of Ewell's division, "clung obsti- 
nately" to their ground.* A brief lull took 
place, broken by the advance of Sumner, with 
two divisions pushing hotly across the turnpike, 
his veteran troops cheering and being cheered, 
confident of sweeping everything before them. 
Beyond the turnpike, however, they came on the 
remnants of Jackson's divisions, lying behind 
a rocky ledge, who gave them a staggering re- 
ception, and at this moment the divisions of 

* Ropes's, II, pp. 361-362. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 131 

McLaws and Walker, who, sent by Lee from his 
right, had just come up and deployed across 
Sumner's and Sedgwick's flank, poured forth 
on them a fire so ''terrible and sustained" that, 
after a futile effort to change front, the federals 
broke and fell back in confusion under the shel- 
ter of their artillery, with a loss of over 2,200, 
officers and men, all within a few minutes. This 
act of Lee in reinforcing his left wing from his 
right at this critical juncture. Ropes praises as 
exhibiting remarkable "skill and resolution." 
An effort made to press Sedgwick's defeated 
troops, who reformed behind their artillery, was 
repulsed by the artillery, but not until 39J per 
cent, of McLaw's division had fallen. A little 
later the remnants of Jones's and Lawton's 
troops drove the enemy from the ground they 
had secured in the second assault; but by this 
time all the Confederate troops in that part of 
the field had sustained terrific losses. "They 
had, indeed," says Ropes, "with the utmost 
bravery, with inflexible resolution and at a ter- 
rible sacrifice of life, repelled the third attack 
on the left flank of the Confederate army."* 
Meantime, Sumner's other division, under 
French, which was put in to reinforce Sedg- 
wick, had by bearing southward, been engaged 

* Ropes's, II, p. 367. 



132 ROBERT E. LEE 

in a bloody and desperate conflict on Lee's 
left centre, with the divisions of D. H. Hill and 
R. H. Anderson, the latter of whom, on his way 
to reinforce the left wing, finding Hill's already 
decimated brigades hard pressed, had turned 
aside to their succor. They were soon in a des- 
perate struggle with over 10,000 fresh troops, 
under French and Richardson. The combat 
which followed, "was," says Ropes, "beyond 
a question one of the most sanguinary and des- 
perate in the whole war." * For an hour or 
more the conflict raged over the famous sunken 
road before the Federals secured possession of 
it, and "Bloody Lane" is the name to-day by 
which is known this deadly roadway whose pos- 
session that day cost over 6,000 men. "At this 
moment," says the same high authority whose 
account we are following, "fortune favored 
McClellan. The two divisions of Franklin's 
corps under W. F. Smith and Slocum, had 
arrived on this part of the field." They num- 
bered from 10,000 to 12,000 men, fresh and in 
good condition. 

Franklin wished to put them in, but Sumner, 
who had tested the temper of the men who held 
Lee's line, was unwilling to risk another attack 
and "McClellan, undoubtedly much influenced 

* Ropes's, II, p. 368. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 133 

by Sumner, would not permit any attack." 
The battle was now raging along the front of 
Lee's right, protected by the Antietam. About 
I p. M. the bridge was carried, and the stream 
was crossed both above and below, but not until 
four assaults had been repelled by Tombs*s bri- 
gade of D. R. Jones's division, assisted by the 
well posted artillery. About three o'clock Cox 
made his assault on the heights where lay 
Lee's right, and achieved "a brilliant success,'! 
breaking the infantry line and capturing Mc- 
intosh's battery; and says Ropes, "A complete 
victory seemed within sight. But this was not 
to be." Just at the crucial moment the Con- 
federate "light division" — five brigades under 
A. P. Hill, pushing from Harper's Ferry, for the 
sound of the guns "climbed the heights south of 
the town," and "without an instant's hesitation 
they rushed to the rescue of their comrades," 
and the end was not long in coming. The lines 
were recaptured along with Mcintosh's battery, 
and the Federal troops, with victory apparently 
almost in their grasp were driven back with ter- 
rific slaughter. "The failure to put Franklin 
in," was, in the opinion of Ropes, a capital 
error. He insists that McClellan should have 
won the battle; for unlike those who argue 
only from subsequent events, this thoughtful 



134 ROBERT E. LEE 

student of war admits that while "Lee's inva- 
sion had terminated in failure," he and his 
army had unquestionably won glory, even though 
he claims that the prestige of victory rested later 
with McClellan.* Thus ended what is said to 
have been the bloodiest day of the war, and one 
of the bloodiest battles ever fought. Each side 
lost about one-quarter of the troops engaged, 
and Lee had, with less than half the force his 
enemy had, though compelled to fight in a place 
where he had not intended to fight, beaten his 
brave enemy off with such slaughter that though 
he offered him battle next day, he was not again 
attacked, and the following morning he retired 
across the Potomac unmolested. Of "his in- 
trepidity" in standing to fight an army of 70,000 
with less than 40,000 men, not all of whom in 
fact were with him at the commencement of the 
action, Ropes has nothing but praise. "Nor 
could any troops," he adds, "have more fully 
justified the reliance their leader placed in them 
than the troops of the army of Northern Vir- 
ginia." f "Lee, in fact, intended to try his men 
again." Both Longstreet and Jackson urged 
recrossing the Potomac that night; but he re- 
fused. "Gentlemen," he said, when his gen- 

* Ropes's, "Story of the Civil War," II, p. 379. 
t Ropes's, II, p. 377. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 135 

erals had advised retreat, "I shall remain 
where I am. If McClellan offers me a chance, 
I shall fight him again." All the next day he 
watched for this chance as the eagle watches 
from his crag for the prey; but it did not come 
and he recrossed into Virginia. 

Of the battle of Antietam the view usually 
expressed is one largely influenced by events 
which succeeded it after a long interval. The 
view at the time, based on the actual battle and 
its immediate consequences was widely differ- 
ent. Horace Greeley's paper representing the 
great constituency which at that time opposed 
Lincoln's methods, voiced their opinion. "He 
leaves us," he declared, "the debris of his late 
camp, two disabled pieces of artillery, a few 
hundred of his stragglers; perhaps two thou- 
sand of his wounded and as many more of his 
unburied dead. Not a sound field-piece, cais- 
son, ambulance or wagon; not a tent, box of 
stores or a pound of ammunition. He takes 
with him the supplies gathered in Maryland and 
the rich spoils of Harper's Ferry." * 

What those rich spoils were Lee himself men- 
tions in the general order issued to his army two 
weeks after it had "on the field of Sharpsburg 
with less than one-third of his [the enemy's] 

* New York Tribune. Quoted from Jones's "Lee," p. 195. 



136 ROBERT E. LEE 

numbers . . . resisted from daylight until dark 
the whole army of the enemy and repulsed 
every attack along his entire front of more than 
four miles in extent.'' 

In this order the Commanding General re- 
counts to his army its achievements, in review^ing 
which he declares he "cannot withhold the expres- 
sion of his admiration of the indomitable courage 
it has displayed in battle, and its cheerful endur- 
ance of privation and hardship on the march." * 

"Since your great victories around Rich- 
mond," he declares, "you have defeated the 
enemy at Cedar Mountain, expelled him from 
the Rappahannock, and after a conflict of three 
days, utterly repulsed him on the plain of Ma- 
nassas, and forced him to take shelter within the 
fortifications around his capital. Without halt- 
ing for repose, you crossed the Potomac, stormed 
the heights of Harper's Ferry, made prisoners 
of more than 11,600 men and captured upward 
of seventy pieces of artillery, all of their small 
arms and other munitions of war. While one 
corps of the army was thus engaged, another 
ensured its success by arresting at Boonsboro 
the combined armies of the enemy, advancing 
under their favorite general to the relief of their 
beleaguered comrades. 

* General Orders, No. ii6. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 137 

"On the field of Sharpsburg, with less than 
one-third of his numbers, you resisted from day- 
light till dark the whole army of the enemy, 
and repulsed every attack along his entire front 
of more than four miles in extent. 

"The whole of the following day you stood pre- 
pared to resume the conflict on the same ground, 
and retired next morning without molestation 
across the Potomac. 

"Two attempts subsequently made by the en- 
emy to follow you across the river have resulted 
in his complete discomfiture and his being 
driven back with loss." 

Such was the view that the Commanding 
General, Lee, himself, took of his campaign two 
weeks after the battle of Antietam, and it is no 
wonder that he should have added, "Achieve- 
ments such as these demanded much valor and 
patriotism. History records few examples of 
greater fortitude and endurance than this army 
has exhibited," or that he should, as he reports, 
have "been commissioned by the President to 
thank the army, in the name of the Confederate 
States for the undying fame they had won for 
their arms." 

In truth, whatever long subsequent events 
may have developed as to the consequences of 
the attack at Sharpsburg and Lee's retirement 



138 ROBERT E. LEE 

across the Potomac afterward, to the student of 
war, now, as then, it must appear that the hon- 
ors of that bloodiest battle of the war were with 
Lee and remain with him to-day. That Mc- 
Clellan with the complete disposition of Lee*s 
forces in his hand, with an army of 87,000 men, 
as brave as ever died for glory and as gallantly 
officered, should not have destroyed Lee with 
but 35,000 on the field, and that Lee, with but 
that number up, while the rest shoeless and 
lame, were limping far behind, yet trying to get 
up, should with his back to the river, have not 
only survived that furious day, repulsing every 
attack along that bloody four miles front, but 
should have stood his ground to offer battle 
again next day and then have retired across 
the river unmolested, is proof beyond all 
doubt.* 

'* Why do you not move that line of battle to 
make it conform to your own.?" asked Hunter 
McGuire of Grigsby, gazing at a long line of 
men lying quietly in ranks in a field at some 
little distance. 

"Those men are all dead," was the reply, 
"they are Georgia soldiers." f 

* The Union losses were 12,400; Confederate, 8,000. 
t Address on Stonewall Jackson, by Dr. Hunter McGuire, 
"The Confederate Cause," p. 204. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 139 

That night 20,000 men, dead or wounded, 
lay on the field of Sharpsburg. 

I have thought well to discuss somewhat at 
length this great battle fought by Lee on North- 
ern soil, because it seems to illustrate peculiarly 
those qualities which, in combination, made him 
the great captain he was, and absolutely refutes 
the foolish if not malevolent charge that he was 
only a defensive general, and remarkable only 
when behind breastworks. It exhibits absolutely 
his grasp of the most difficult and unexpected sit- 
uation; his unequalled audacity; his intrepidity; 
his resourcefulness; his incomparable resolu- 
tion and his skill in handling men alike in de- 
tached sections and on the field of battle. Pos- 
sibly no other general on either side would have 
had the boldness to risk the stand Lee made in 
the angle of the Antietam, with the Potomac at 
his back; certainly no other general save Grant 
would have stood his ground after the battle, 
and have saved the morale of his army, and as 
to Grant it is merely conjecture; for he fought 
no battle south of the Rapidan in which he did 
not largely outnumber his antagonist, and vastly 
excel him in equipment. 

It is true, as Ropes states, that McClellan 
followed Lee across the Potomac, but his two 
immediate attempts were promptly repelled 



140 ROBERT E. LEE 

and his troops driven back, and it was not until 
more than a month later, when Lee lay about 
Winchester, that McClellan made good a foot- 
ing in Virginia. During this time Stuart had 
again crossed over into Maryland, and made a 
complete circuit of McClellan's army. 

In the early days of November McClellan 
advanced on Warrenton, and Lee, in anticipa- 
tion, moved down to the east of the Blue Ridge 
and occupied Culpeper and the region south of 
the Rappahannock, and after a tart correspond- 
ence between McClellan and the authorities in 
Washington over McClellan's failure to destroy 
Lee's army, McClellan was relieved of his com- 
mand, and Burnside appointed in his place, the 
order issuing on the 6th of November. Thus, 
the North lost the services of the general whom 
General Lee considered the best commander 
opposed to him during the war. That he was 
not Lee's equal either as a strategist, a tactician 
or a fighter, was clearly manifest then as it is 
now; but he was a great organizer; conducted 
war on high principles; restored the morale of a 
shattered army and defeated the object of 
Lee's first invasion of Maryland. And as has 
been already quoted, it was well said that 
"without McClellan there could have been no 
Grant." 



LEE'S AUDACITY 141 

"Though badly found in weapons, ammu- 
nition, mihtary equipment, etc.,'* says Field 
Marshal Viscount Wolseley, in speaking of Lee 
at this time, "his army had, nevertheless, 
achieved great things. His men were so badly 
shod (indeed, a considerable portion had no 
boots or shoes) that at the battle of Antietam 
General Lee assured me he never had more 
than 35,000 men with him; the remainder of 
his army, shoeless and footsore, were straggling 
along the roads in the rear trying to reach him 
in time for the battle." 

Had Lee been in McClellan's place who can 
doubt what the issue would have been! In fact, 
Mr. Lincoln plainly put this question to McClel- 
lan in another connection, and a little later re- 
lieved him of command and put the brave but 
hesitating Burnside in his place only to add on 
the fatal field of Fredericksburg new laurels to 
Lee's chaplet. 

Burnside, having made it manifest that he 
designed to cross the Rappahannock at Fred- 
ericksburg, Lee promptly moved down from 
Culpeper and Orange on the upper waters of 
the Rappahannock, and posting himself on the 
heights on the southern side of the town, forti- 
fied and awaited Burnside's advance. The 
fortifications for the artillery were made under 



142 ROBERT E. LEE 

the superintendence of General Lee's chief of 
artillery, General Wm. N. Pendleton, and were 
much commended. At least they served. It 
was now nearly mid-December. Burnside's 
forces as given by himself numbered 113,000; 
while Lee's total strength was 78,288 men of all 
arms.* 

The actual laying of the pontoons was gal- 
lantly effected by the federal troops on the after- 
noon of the I ith, under cover of a heavy artillery 
fire from 150 guns, and that evening and the fol- 
lowing day Burnside's army crossed over, their 
movements being veiled by a heavy fog which rose 
from the river and the sodden ground, blanketing 
all beneath it. The following morning, as the 
fog lifted, Burnside's army, with Franklin com- 
manding his left and Sumner his right, advanced 
to the attack where Lee lay along the heights 
above the town, with Longstreet commanding 
his left and Jackson his right. It was a battle 
as fierce almost as Sharpsburg, and scarcely less 
deadly for the hapless assailants. The assault 
began on the less commanding hills to the south 
of the town where Jackson lay, his right pro- 
tected by the artillery and Stuart's cavalry, faced 
North on the plain near Hamilton's crossing. 
Line after line advanced to the attack, only to 

♦Taylor's "General Lee," pp. 145-146. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 143 

be swept back with terrific slaughter, and at one 
point where a marshy stream, known as Deep 
Run, came through, bordered by woodland, the 
gallant assailants broke through the advanced 
line of A. P. Hill; but they were quickly forced 
back and the line re-established. Franklin's 
brave divisions having failed to break Lee's right, 
an assault was made against Lee's left by Sum- 
ner who had been ordered to hold his men where 
they were sheltered by the town, until " an im- 
pression" could be made on Lee's right. It was 
an even more impossible and deadly task than 
Franklin had essayed. " Six distinct and separate 
assaults were made against Longstreet's front"; 
line after line rushing recklessly forward under 
the iron sleet, "only to be torn to pieces," and 
melt away, without making any impression on 
Lee's determined veterans. When night came, 
the great army of Burnside had been hurled 
back with losses amounting to 12,500 men, 
"sacrificed to incompetency," after having dis- 
played, in a task which "exceeded human en- 
deavor," a heroism which "won the praise and 
the pity of their opponents." * 

The following day passed without the renewal 

* Taylor's " General Lee," p. 148. The losses in the Federal 
Army numbered 12,653; ini the Confederate Army, 5,322, killed 
and wounded. 



144 ROBERT E. LEE 

of the attack which Lee expected, and that 
night Burnside, shaken and distressed over his 
disaster, withdrew his decimated divisions across 
the Rappahannock and next morning sent a flag 
of truce to Jackson's front, asking for a cessa- 
tion of hostihties to bury the dead.* 

Fredericksburg was, with the exception of 
Cold Harbor, almost the only wholly defensive 
battle that Lee fought, and in this he could 
scarcely beUeve that Burnside had put forth all 
his strength. His report and letters show that 
he expected and awaited another and fiercer 
assault. It is asserted that Jackson counselled 
a night attack on Burnside's army as it lay in 
the town after the battle, and he undoubtedly 
contemplated the possibility of such an attack, 
for he ordered his chief of medical staff to be 



* The writer as a small boy rode over the battlefield of Fred- 
ericksburg with his father, who was a Major on the staff of Gen- 
eral Wm. N. Pendleton, General Lee's chief of artillery, and he 
recalls vividly the terrible sight of a battlefield while the dead are 
being buried: blood everywhere — along the trenches, the shat- 
tered fences and the roadsides — the orchards, peeled by the 
bullets and canister, looked at a little distance as if covered with 
snow; the plank fences splintered by shot and shrapnel, looked 
as though they had been whitewashed, and the field, torn by shells 
and covered with dead horses, broken arms and debris, presented 
an ineffaceable scene of desolation, while on the common, being 
filled with the bloody and rigid forms of those who two days before 
had been the bravest of the brave, was a long, wide, ghastly trench, 
where the path of glory ended. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 145 

ready with his bandages to furnish bands for 
the arms of the men, by which they would know 
each other, should such an attack be made.* 
Lee, however, decided against this plan, if it 
was ever formally proposed, and in his report 
he gives his reason. "The attack on the 13th,'* 
he says, "had been so easily repulsed and by so 
small a part of our army that it was not sup- 
posed the enemy would limit his effort, which 
in view of the magnitude of his preparations 
and the extent of his force, seemed to be com- 
paratively insignificant. Believing, therefore, 
that he would attack us, it was not deemed ex- 
pedient to lose the advantage of our position 
and expose the troops to the fire of his inac- 
cessible batteries, beyond the river by advancing 
against him." 

Lee was at this time at the zenith of his fame 
as a successful general, yet was never more 
modest. His letter of Christmas Day, 1862, to 
his wife is full of the spirit of the man in his 
most intimate moments. He writes: "I will 
commence this holy day by writing to you. 
My heart is filled with gratitude to God for the 
unspeakable mercies with which He has blessed 
us in this day; for those He has granted us from 

* Address on Stonewall Jackson, by Dr. Hunter McGuire, 
The Confederate Cause." The Bell Co., Richmond, Virginia. 



146 ROBERT E. LEE 

the beginning of Life, and particularly for those 
he has vouchsafed us during the past year. 
What should have become of us without His 
crowning help and protection ? Oh ! if our 
people would only recognize it and cease from 
vain self-boasting and adulation, how strong 
would be my belief in final success and happi- 
ness to our country. But what a cruel thing is 
war to separate and destroy families and friends, 
and mar the purest joys and happiness God has 
granted us in this world, to fill our hearts with J 
hatred instead of love for our neighbors and to 
devastate the fair face of this beautiful world! 
I pray that on this day when only peace and 
good will are preached to mankind, better 
thoughts may fill the hearts of our enemies and 
turn them to peace. Our army was never in 
such good health and condition since I have 
been attached to it. I believe they share with 
me my disappointment that the enemy did not 
renew the combat on the 13th. I was holding 
back all that day and husbanding our strength 
and ammunition for the great struggle for which 
I thought I was preparing. Had I divined that 
was to have been his only effort, he would have 
had more of it. My heart bleeds at the death of 
every one of our gallant men." 

Should the portrait of a victorious general be 



LEE'S AUDACITY 147 

drawn, I know no better example than this 
simple outline of a Christian soldier drawn out 
of his heart that Christmas morning in his tent, 
while the world rang with his victory of two weeks 
before. It is a portrait of which the South may 
well be proud. 

But again we have, following on his success 
in the defence of Fredericksburg, the proof of 
Lee's boldness in offensive operations, which re- 
sulted in what is esteemed among foreign mili- 
tary critics as the most brilliant action, not only 
of the Civil War, but of the century. 

With a vast expenditure of care and treasure, 
the armies of the Union were once more re- 
cruited and equipped, and the command of the 
Army of the Potomac was entrusted to General 
Hooker, "Fighting Joe Hooker," as he was 
called — whose reputation was such that he was 
supposed to make good at once all the deficiencies 
of McClellan and Burnside. He had shown 
capacity to command a corps both in the West 
and the East, and was given to criticising his 
superiors with much self-confidence. His self- 
confidence was, indeed, so great that it called 
from Mr. Lincoln one of those remarkable letters 
which he was given to writing on occasion. The 
plan on which he proceeded was acknowledged 
to be well-conceived and gave promise of victory. 



148 ROBERT E. LEE 

While Burnside was ordered to cross the Rappa- 
hannock below Lee's fortified position at Fred- 
ericksburg, threaten his right flank, and assail his 
lines of communication with Richmond, Hooker 
marched up the river, crossed it high up beyond 
Lee's extreme left and prepared to assail his rear. 
In the full assurance that he had " the finest army 
in the world holding the strongest position on 
the planet," he elaborated his plans and pre- 
pared to deliver the assault which should force 
Lee from his defensive position with the alter- 
native of the capture of his entire army. Possibly, 
he ranked Lee as a captain good for defensive 
operations alone. If so, his error cost him dear. 
While he was congratulating himself on his 
tactics and issuing grandiloquent proclama- 
tions to his eager yet untried army in the tone of 
a conqueror, declaring that the enemy must 
come out from his breastworks and fight him on 
his own ground "where certain destruction 
awaited him," or else " ingloriously fly," Lee 
performed the same masterly feat which he had 
already perform,ed before Richmond and in the 
Piedmont, and with yet more signal success. 
Detaching Stonewall Jackson from his force in 
front of Burnside, he sent him around Hooker's 
right at Chancellorsville, and while the latter 
was congratulating himself that Lee was in 



LEE'S AUDACITY 149 

full retreat on Gordonsville, he fell upon him 
and rolled him up like a scroll. Unhappily, 
his great lieutenant who performed this feat, fell 
in the moment of victory, shot by his own men 
in the dusk of the evening as he galloped past 
from a reconnaissance. Possibly, Hooker's army 
was saved by this fatal accident from capture 
or annihilation that night. For when, a week 
later, Stonewall Jackson, still murmuring of his 
battle lines, passed over the river to rest under 
the shade of the trees, it was with a fame hardly 
second to that of his great captain. 

The question has often been debated whether 
the chief credit for the victory at Chancellors- 
ville should be assigned to Lee or to Jackson. 
Lee, himself, has settled it in a letter which he 
wrote to Mrs. Jackson, in which he states that 
the responsibility for the flank attack by Jack- 
son, that is, for the tactics which made it possible, 
necessarily rested on him. He repeated the 
statement in a letter to his friend. Professor 
Bledsoe. And apart from his conclusive state- 
ment, this is the judgment of Jackson's biog- 
rapher. General Henderson. Commenting on 
the question as to whether to Lee or Jackson 
the credit was due for the daring plan of the 
campaign against Pope, Henderson says, "We 
have record of few enterprises of greater daring 



150 ROBERT E. LEE 

than that which was then decided on; and no 
matter from whose brain it emanated, on Lee 
fell the burden of the responsibility; on his 
shoulders and on his alone, rested the honor of 
the Confederate arms, the fate of Richmond, 
the independence of the South; and if we may 
suppose, so consonant was the design proposed 
with the strategy which Jackson had already 
practised, that it was to him its inception was 
due, it is still to Lee that we must assign the 
higher merit. It is easy to conceive. It is less 
easy to execute. But to risk cause and country, 
name and reputation, on a single throw, and to 
abide the issue with unflinching heart, is the 
supreme exhibition of the soldier's fortitude." * 
It is, indeed, no disparagement from Jackson's 
fame to declare that, if possible, even more 
brilliant than the afternoon attack on Hooker's 
right which routed that wing and began the de- 
moralization of his army, was the final attack, 
when Lee, who had left Early with only enough 
men at Fredericksburg to hold Burnside in 
check, learning that Sedgwick had forced a 
crossing and was marching on his rear, turned 
and, leaving only a fragment of his army to hold 
the shaken Hooker in his breastworks, fell on 
Sedgwick and hurled him back across the river, 

* Henderson's "Life of Stonewall Jackson," II., p. 582. 



LEE'S AUDACITY 151 

and then, turning again, fell on Hooker's posi- 
tion, and so crushed him that he was glad to 
retreat by night, broken and discouraged, across 
the Rappahannock. 

The victory of Chancellorsville, in which Lee 
with 62,000 men and 170 guns completely 
routed Hooker on his own ground with 120,000 
men and 448 guns, was, declares Henderson, 
"the most brilliant feat of arms of the century." 
Thus, Lee had destroyed the reputation of more 
generals than any captain had destroyed since 
Napoleon. 

But the attrition was grinding away the forces 
of the blockaded and beleaguered Confederacy. 
It was a case of "One more such victory and we 
are lost." It became necessary to remove the 
seat of war into a new region. For this reason 
Lee, boldly flanking Hooker, who, secure on the 
further side of the Rappahannock, was boasting 
still, marched his army into Maryland and Penn- 
sylvania, not for conquest, but for subsistence, 
and to employ once more, at need, the strategy 
which he knew would compel the withdrawal of 
the forces still threatening Richmond. 

With masterly foresight he had once written 
that a pitched battle would probably be fought 
at York, or at Gettysburg. 

It was thus that the wheat-clad ridges about 



152 ROBERT E. LEE 

the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, with 
the valley between them, became the field of the 
battle which possibly turned the fluctuating tide 
of the war. Lee's meeting with Meade's army 
at this spot was to some extent a surprise to him; 
for his able and gallant cavalry commander, 
Stuart, on whom he had relied to keep him in- 
formed touching the enemy, had been led by 
the ardor of a successful raid further afield than 
had been planned, and the presence of Meade's 
army in force was unsuspected until too late to 
decline battle.* Heth's division had sought the 
place for imperatively needed supplies and 
found the Union troops holding it, and a battle 
was precipitated. Lee's plan of battle failed 
here, but the student of war knows how it 
failed and why. It failed because his lieuten- 
ants failed, and his orders were not carried out 
— possibly because he called on his intrepid 
army for more than human strength was able 
to achieve. "Had I had Jackson at Gettys- 
burg," he once said, "I should, so far as man 
can judge, have won that battle." 

* That Stuart was in any way responsible for this is denied by 
Colonel John S. Mosby, in his "Stuart in the Gettysburg Cam- 
paign." 



CHAPTER X 

LEE'S CLEMENCY 

TJOSSIBLY, Lee's one fault as a soldier was 
that he was not always rigorous enough with 
his subordinates; that, if such a thing be possible, 
he was too magnanimous. He took blame on him- 
self where it should rightly have been adjudged 
to others. Yet, this weakness as a soldier but 
added to his nobility as a man, and it is as a 
man — a type of the man bred of Southern blood 
and under the Southern civilization that we are 
now considering him. 

While many competent critics in his army 
were charging Longstreet with having been the 
cause of the disaster at Gettysburg, Lee wrote 
him a letter such as only a man of noble nature 
could have written to an old comrade who had 
failed him. He showed him a magnanimity 
which was ill requited when Longstreet wrote 
his own story of the war. 

As the years pass by, the military genius of 
Lee must be more and more restricted to the study 
of a class. His character will ever remain the 

153 



154 ROBERT E. LEE 

precious possession of his kindred and his people. 
In all the annals of his race none has excelled It. 
Among his characteristics his humanity stands 
forth to distinguish him forever from possibly 
nearly all his contemporaries. Colonel Charles 
Marshall, of his staff, who knew him best among 
men, declares that he never put a spy to death, 
and the story Is well known of his clemency In 
the case of a deserter who had been found guilty 
by a court-martial, and condemned to death. It 
was during the terrible campaign of 1864, when 
the women at home wrote such heart-rending ac- 
counts of their want to their husbands In the 
field, that Lee was compelled to forbid the malls 
to be delivered. A soldier who had disappeared 
from his regiment and gone home was arrested 
and tried as a deserter. His defence was a letter 
which he had received from his wife, which 
showed that she and her children were starving. 
It was held Insufficient, and he was sentenced to 
be shot. The case, however, was so pitiful that 
it was finally presented to General Lee. He 
wrote beneath the finding his approval, and then 
below that, an order that the man should Im- 
mediately rejoin his regiment. There were, of 
course, unhappily, other Instances enough In 
which discipline had to be enforced, and when 
the exigency arose he was rock. But, as has 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 155 

been well said by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, 
possibly his surest and loftiest title to enduring 
fame was, "his humanity in arms and his 
scrupulous regard for the most advanced rules 
of modern warfare." * 

An incident, small in itself, but illustrative of 
the compassionate character of Lee occurred 
during one of his fiercest battles. He was stand- 
ing with officers of his staff in the yard of a 
dwelling on an eminence, when the group at- 
tracted the attention of the enemy and a hot 
fire was directed on them. General Lee sug- 
gested to his companions to go to a less exposed 
spot, but he himself remained where he was. 
A little later as he moved about he stooped and 
picked up a young bird, and, walking across the 
yard, placed the fledgling on a limb in a place 
of security. 

It was characteristic of him that ordinarily, 
wherever he might be, he slept in a tent, for fear 
of incommoding the occupants of the houses he 
might have taken for his headquarters, and at 
times when he was inspecting the long lines from 
Richmond to Petersburg, he even hesitated to 
seek shelter at night in the camp of an acquaint- 
ance lest he might inconvenience him.f 

♦Address delivered at Lexington, Virginia, January 19, 1907. 
t Long's "Lee," quoting Col. Thomas H. Carter. 



156 ROBERT E. LEE 

He writes later, during the stress of war, to 
his eldest son, "... I hope we will be able to 
do something for the servants. I executed a 
deed of manumission embracing all the names 
sent me by your mother, and some that I recol- 
lected, but as I had nothing to refer to but my 
memory, I fear many were omitted. It was my 
desire to manumit all the people of your grand- 
father, whether present on the several estates or 
not. I believe your mother only sent me the 
names of those present at W.[hiteJ H.[ouse], and 
Romancoke. Those that have left with the 
enemy may not require their manumission. 
Still, some may be found hereafter in the State, 
and, at any rate, I wished to give a complete 
list, and to liberate all to show that your grand- 
father's wishes, so far as I was concerned, had 
been fulfilled. ... I shall pay wages to Perry 
[his body-servant], and retain him until he or I 
can do better. You can do the same with Billy. 
The rest that are hired out had better be fur- 
nished with their papers and be let go. But 
what can be done with those at the W. H. and 
Romancoke ? Those at and about Arlington 
can take care of themselves, I hope, and I have 
no doubt but all are gone who desire to do so. 
At any rate, I can do nothing for them now.*' * 

* Letter to General G. W. C. Lee, January nth, 1863. 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 157 

In another letter, dated March 31, 1863, he 
writes further showing his soHcitude about his 
freed servants. One he wishes a place gotten 
for on a Railway; two others who had been 
hired out he advises to remain where they are 
till the end of the year, when they are to have 
their earnings devoted to their own benefit. 
"But what can be done," he asks, "with poor 
little Jim ? It would be cruel to turn him out on 
the world. He could not take care of himself." * 

This is an epitome of the old Virginian's rela- 
tion to his servants, and it will be observed that 
this representative of his class never speaks of 
them as his slaves, even in discussing intimately 
with his son their legal status. 

His love of children and his companionship 
with them shine forth in his letters, and mark 
the simpHcity that is so often allied to true 
greatness. In one of his letters to his wife long 
before the war, when he was on duty in the 
West, he gives a glimpse of this tenderness 
toward children which ever distinguished him. 
He says of a ride he took: "... I saw a num- 
ber of little girls, all dressed up in their white 
frocks and pantalets, their hair plaited and tied 
up with ribbons, running and chasing each 
other in all directions. I counted twenty-three 

* Jones's "Life and Letters of Robert E. Lee," pp. 286-287. 



158 ROBERT E. LEE 

nearly the same size. As I drew up my horse to 
admire the spectacle, a man appeared at the 
door with the twenty-fourth in his arms. *My 
friend,' said I, 'are all these your children?' 

"'Yes,' he said, 'and there are nine more in 
the house and this is my youngest.' 

"Upon further inquiry, however, I found 
that they were only temporarily his. He said, 
however, that he had been admiring them be- 
fore I came up, and just wished that he had a 
million of dollars, and that they were all his in 
reality. I do not think the eldest exceeded 
seven or eight years old. It was the prettiest 
sight I have seen in the West, and, perhaps, in 
my life. ..." 

Such was the heart of this great Captain who, 
to some, seemed cold and aloof when, as Emer- 
son says, his genius only protected itself by 
solitude. 

Writing, years after, to his wife, of three little 
girls, the children of an old neighbor who had 
lived near them in happier days at Arlington, 
who had paid him a visit in his camp near 
Petersburg, each with a basket in which they 
had brought him fresh eggs, pickles and a pair 
of socks, "I begged them," he said, "to bring 
me nothing but their kisses and to keep the 
eggs, corn, etc., for themselves." 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 159 

Of Lee's tranquil mind even amid the most 
difficult conditions, we have constant proof. No 
apparent disadvantage of position no threats or 
impending dangers appear to have disturbed 
that equanimity which so marks him as among 
the great. 

While McClellan, accepting the wildest state- 
ments of ''intelligent contrabands" was rating 
the force in his front at two and a half times its 
actual numbers and was throwing away precious 
time while he clamored for reinforcements, and 
while his successors often saw a vast army in 
their front whose shadows caused them much 
delay, Lee, from the first, even amid the deep- 
est darkness of the situation saw with a clear- 
ness which no gloom could obscure. Writing 
from his camp, during the Western Virginia cam- 
paign he says: "The force of the enemy esti- 
mated by prisoners captured is put down at 
from 17,000 to 20,000. General Floyd thinks 
18,000. I do not think it exceeds 9,000 or 
10,000, but it exceeds ours." * 

From camp near Orange Court House he 
writes on the eve of the battle of Second Man- 
assas, under date of August 17, 1862: "Gen- 
eral Pope says he is very strong and seems to 

* Letter to Mrs. Lee, October 7, 1861; letter to his son, Major 
W. H. F. Lee, October 12, 1861, 



i6o ROBERT E. LEE 

feel so; for he is moving apparently up the 
Rapidan. I hope he will not prove stronger 
than we are. I learn since I have left that 
General McClellan has moved down the James 
River, with his whole army, so we shall have 
busy times. Burnside and King from Fred- 
ericksburg have joined Pope, which from their 
own report has swelled Pope to 92,000. I do 
not believe it, though I believe he is very big." 

"General Hooker," he wrote, "is agitating 
something on the other side, or at all events he 
is agitating his troops. . . . Yesterday he was 
marching his men up and down the river. . . ." 

And again, "General Hooker is airing him- 
self north of the Rappahannock and again 
threatening us with a crossing. ... I think he 
will consider it a few days." And this of an 
enemy who had, by his own field-reports a little 
later, 137,378 men, whom he had pronounced 
"the finest army on the planet," while Lee had 
only 53,303. But if Hooker prided himself on 
his fine army, Lee had no less confidence in his 
own, however outnumbered. "I agree with 
you," he wrote Hood, "in believing that our 
army would be invincible if properly organized 
and officered. There never were such men in 
an army before. They will go anywhere and do 
anything if properly led. But there is the diffi- 



LEE'S CLEMENCY i6i 

culty — proper commanders; where can they be 
obtained?"* 

Once he wrote, "General Hooker is obHged 
to do something: I do not know what it will be. 
He is playing the Chinese game, trying what 
frightening will do. He runs out his guns, 
starts his wagons and troops up and down the 
river and creates an excitement generally. Our 
men look on in wonder, give a cheer, and all 
again subsides in statu quo ante bellum." f 

It has been customary to think of piety as the 
peculiar attribute of Jackson, the Puritan in 
type, rather than of Lee, the Cavalier. But, if 
possible, Lee was even more pious than his 
great Lieutenant. In fact, both were men who, 
in the early prime of their manhood, conse- 
crated themselves to God, and thenceforth served 
him with a single heart. It shines forth in every 
page they ever penned. It was the basis of their 
character; it formed the foundation of that 
wonderful poise which, amid the most difficult 
and arduous situations left them the supreme 
tranquillity which was the field in which their 
powers found exercise. No one can familiarize 
himself with Lee's life without seeing that he 
was a man consecrated to the work of his 

* Letter to General J. B. Hood, May 21, 1863. 
t Letter to his daughter Agnes, February 26, 1863. 



i62 ROBERT E. LEE 

Divine Master and amid all conditions pos- 
sessed a mind stayed on Him. 

Not Cromwell's army was more religious 
than that which followed Lee, and the great 
Protector was not so pious as the great Captain 
who led the army of Northern Virginia. 

The principle on which he acted was stated 
in one of his letters: *' We are all in the hands of 
a kind God," he wrote, **who will do for us 
what is best, and more than we deserve, and we 
have only to endeavor to deserve more and to do 
our duty to Him and to ourselves. May we all de- 
serve His mercy, His care and His protection."* 

Such was the man to whom Virginia con- 
fided the leadership of her soldiery. 

His advice to his youngest son, whom he had 
advised on leaving college to enlist in a good 
company, was characteristic of him: "To be 
obedient to all authority, and to do his duty in 
everything, great or small." f 

It was also characteristic alike of him and of 
the soldiery of the South that he should have 
refused to procure for this son a commission, 
as long afterward he promptly discounte- 
nanced the idea of promoting his eldest son 
(though a soldier so accomplished that he 

* Letter of September i, 1856; cited in Jones's "Lee" p. 81. 
I " Recollections of General Lee,'" by Captain R. E. Lee. 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 163 

wished for him as his chief of staff) over the 
heads of officers who had served under him and 
proved their capacity under his eye. 

"I do not think," says the former, in his in- 
^resting "Recollections" of his father, "that 
it ever occurred to my father to have me, or 
rather get me, a position in the army. I know 
it never occurred to me, nor did I ever hear at 
that time or afterward from any one that I 
might have been entitled to better rank because 
of my father's prominence in Virginia and in 
the Confederacy." * 

It was not until that son had fought as a pri- 
vate through the Valley campaigns of Jackson, 
the battles around Richmond, the Maryland 
campaign, and had distinguished himself,f that 
he received the promotion to the staff of his 
brother, General Wm. H. F. Lee. 

Indeed, one of the troubles with which Lee 
had to contend was the efforts made by poli- 
ticians in the civil government to procure com- 
missions and promotions for their constituents, 
and the delay experienced in getting his recom- 
mendations for promotion for merit acted on. 

The fact constitutes one of the few com- 

*" Recollections of General Lee," by R. E. Lee. 
t Moore's "Recollections of a Cannoneer under Jackson." 
Neale Co. 



i64 ROBERT E. LEE 

plaints in his letters, and he set the example by 
steadfastly setting his face against any favorit- 
ism toward his own family. His two sons who 
became generals, were both officers in the old 
army a.nd were both in the retreat to Appomattox 
until one of them was captured with five other 
general officers and some 6,000 men at Taylor's 
Creek in one of the last fights of the war. Of 
their character some idea may be formed from 
the fact that when one of them, General Wm. 
H. F. Lee was held as a hostage under sentence 
of death, the other. General G. W. C. Lee, 
wrote, asking to be accepted as a hostage in his 
stead, placing the offer on the ground that his 
brother had a wife and child, while he, his equal 
in rank, and the eldest son, was unmarried. 

Of his son's confinement under sentence as 
a hostage which, the father says, was "grievous" 
to him, Lee writes to his other son. " I had seen 
in the papers the intention announced by the 
Federal government of holding him as a hostage 
for the tw^o captains selected to be shot. If it is 
right to shoot those men this should make no 
difference in their execution; but I have not 
thought it right to shoot them, and differ in my 
ideas from most of our people on the subject 
of reprisal. Sometimes I know it to be neces- 
sary, but it should not be resorted to at all 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 165 

times, and in our case policy dictates that it 
should be avoided whenever possible." * 

Happy the people that can produce such a 
father and such sons! 

It is told of Sidney that, when wounded and 
perishing of thirst, some one brought him water, 
and he ordered it given to a dying soldier whose 
need was greater than his. Hardly a soldier in 
Lee's army would not have done that which gave 
Sidney fame. Such was the temper and char- 
acter of the men who followed Lee, and such was 
the temper and character of their beloved com- 
mander, whom they loved to call in affectionate 
phrase, " Marse Robert." He was their idol and 
their ideal, and his impress was stamped on his 
army. 

The Master whom he so faithfully and humbly 
tried to serve, whose precepts were ever in his 
heart and whose spirit shone ever in his hfe, had 
laid down for him the law: "And to the soldiers 
he said. Do violence to no man." 

This high rule, like all others of his Divine 
Master, Lee ever followed and so far as possible, 
inculcated on his army, by whom, to their 
eternal honor be it said, the noble example was 
nobly followed. Unhappily for the world and 
for the future reputation of some who otherwise 

* Letter to General G. W. C. Lee, August 7, 1863. 



i66- ROBERT E. LEE 

might as able soldiers have won the admiration 
of a whole people, rather than of a mere section 
of that people, though gentlemen like McClel- 
lan, McDowell, Burnside and the gentlemen 
who followed them conducted war on high 
principles, it was not the invariable rule among 
all commanders. 

Butler had damned himself to everlasting 
fame by orders and acts in Louisiana which no 
soldier can think of without a blush.* Hunter, 
in despite of expostulations, had burnt his way 
through the beautiful valley where Lee was to 
find his last resting place; and had left in his 
track the scarred and blackened ruins of count- 
less dwellings. To the honor of the brave men 
he commanded it is said that he " had to de- 
prive forty of his commissioned officers of their 
commands before he could carry into execution 
his infamous orders." f Even Halleck declared 
his action "barbarous." J It was reserved for 
Sherman, possibly the second greatest general 
on the Northern side, to reverse most completely 

* In his infamous " Order 28 " he had ordered that any woman 
in New Orleans who should " by word, or gesture, or movement 
insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United 
States, should be regarded and treated as a woman of the town, 
plying her avocation." 

t"Ofi5cial Report of History Com., Grand Camp C. V., in 
•The Confederate Cause, ' " p. 103. 

t Sherman's "Memoirs," II, p. 129. 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 167 

the advances of civilization and hark back almost 
to the ferocious methods of mediaevalism. To 
find the proof of this, one has no need to go out- 
side of this officer's ov^n recorded words. 

"War is hell," he was quoted long after as 
saying. He did more than all others to make it 
so. He ruthlessly devastated not only for the 
needs of his army and to deprive his enemy of 
subsistence, but to horrify and appall. He made 
war not only on men, but on women and chil- 
dren. He deliberately strove to carrj terror into 
the hearts of the defenceless. 

"In nearly all his dispatches after he had 
reached the sea,'' says Rhodes, an historian from 
his State, who is his apologist and his admirer, 
" he gloated over the destruction of property." * 

He gloated over the havoc he wrought, first in 
anticipation, as he wrote how he could "make a 
wreck of the country from Chattanooga to At- 
lanta, including the latter city,"f and again, how 
he could "make Georgia howl";! next, in the 
act of its perpetration, as he issued his orders for 
his army to "forage liberally on the country," 
and expressly forbade his officers to give receipts 
for property taken; authorized the wanton 

* Rhodes's " History of the United States," Vol. V, p. 22. 
t Official Records, Vol. XXXIX, Pt. 2, p. 202. 
t Official Records, Vol. XXXIX, Pt. 3, p. 162. 



i68 ROBERT E. LEE 

destruction of mills and houses; and while sub- 
ordinate officers like Howard and Cox and 
Schofield were writhing under the robberies of 
defenceless women, extending even to the tearing 
of rings from their fingers, chuckled over the 
robberies committed by his men — who quoted 
his orders to his face — and reviewed his "bum- 
mers," an organized corps of robbers, who have 
never had their counterpart since the Free Com- 
panies passed from the stage under the awaken- 
ing conscience of modern Europe. 

If these are strong words they are largely 
taken from his own writings. 

He sent an express message to the corps com- 
mander at General Howell Cobb's plantation, 
General Davis, "to explain whose plantation it 
was and instruct him to spare nothing."* This 
was but warring on women, for Cobb was in 
his honored grave two years ere this, having 
fallen at the foot of Marye's Heights, as a brave 
man falls, holding back brave men. "I would 
not restrain the army," he wrote coolly, "lest 
its vigor and energy should be impaired." f 

Speaking of the burning of Columbia, which 
Sherman wrote his brother he had in his report 
"distinctly charged to General Wade Hamil- 

* Sherman's "Memoirs," Vol. II, p. 185. 
t Sherman's "Memoirs," II, p. 255. 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 169 

ton," he adds, "I confess I did so pointedly to 
shake the faith of his people in him."* A dis- 
tinguished historian from his own State has 
declared of this destruction of Columbia, a de- 
fenceless city which had surrendered, that, "It 
was the most monstrous barbarity of this bar- 
barous march. Before his movements began, 
General Sherman had begged permission to 
turn his army loose in South Carolina and 
devastate it. He used this permission to the 
full. He protested that he did not wage war 
upon women and children. But under the 
operations of his orders the last morsel of food 
was taken from hundreds of destitute families 
that his soldiers might feast in needless and riot- 
ous abundance. Before his eyes, rose day after 
day, the mournful clouds of smoke on every side 
that told of old people and their grandchildren 
driven in mid-winter from the only roofs that 
were to shelter them, by the flames which the 
wantonness of his soldiers had kindled. Yet, if 
a single soldier was punished for a single out- 
rage or theft during that entire movement we 
have found no mention of it in all the volu- 
minous records of the march." f 

Place Lee's general order from Chambersburg 

♦Sherman's "Memoirs," II. p. 287. 

t "Ohio in the War," by Hon. Whitelaw Reid. 



170 ROBERT E. LEE 

on invading Pennsylvania, beside Sherman's 
correspondence with Halleck, and let posterity 
judge thereby the character of the commanders. 
Halleck, Chief of Staff and military adviser to 
President Lincoln, w^rites to Sherman, " Should 
you capture Charleston, I hope that by some ac- 
cident the place might be destroyed, and if a lit- 
tle salt should be sov^n upon its site it might pre- 
vent the growth of future crops of nuUification 
and secession," and Sherman replies,* "I will 
bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, and do 
not think salt will be necessary. When I move 
on, the fifteenth corps will be on the right wing, 
and their position will bring them naturally into 
Charleston first, and if you have watched the 
history of that corps you have remarked that 
they generally do up their work pretty 
well." 

While this general was giving orders to burn 
mills and destroy all food sources on which non- 
combatants depended for life, and to convey 
prisoners first, or if prisoners were wanting, then 
non-combatant inhabitants, over all bridges and 
other places suspected of being mined, and "could 
hardly help laughing at their stepping so gin- 
gerly along the road where it was supposed sunk- 

* Dispatch of December 24, 1864. Sherman's "Memoirs," II, 
pp. 223, 227-228. 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 171 

en torpedoes might explode at each step";* and 
while even Grant, not yet risen to his last splendid 
act of magnanimity, as he came to rise in the long 
vigils before Petersburg, was expressing his hope 
to Hunter that his troops would " eat out Virginia 
clear and clean, as far as they could go, so that 
crows flying over it for the balance of the sea- 
son would have to carry their provender with 
them";t — Lee, as he marched into Pennsylvania, 
issued orders to his troops to remember that they 
made war only on armed men, and that no 
greater disgrace could befall the army, and 
through it the whole South, than the perpetra- 
tion of barbarous outrages on the innocent 
and defenceless. This whole order can never 
be too frequently repeated. It gives the man 
as he was. 

Hdqrs. Army of Northern Va., 

Chambersburg, Pa., June 27, 1863. 

Genl. Order No. 72. 

The Commanding General has observed with 
marked satisfaction the conduct of the troops on the 
march, and confidently anticipates results com- 
mensurate with the high spirit they have manifested. 
No troops could have displayed greater fortitude or 

* Sherman's " Memoirs," II, p. 194. 
t Official Records, Vol. XXXVII, Pt. 2, pp. 300, 301. 



172 ROBERT E. LEE 

better performed the arduous marches of the past ten 
days. Their conduct in other respects has, with few 
exceptions, been in keeping with their character as 
soldiers and entitles them to approbation and praise. 

There have, however, been instances of forgetfulness 
on the part of some that they have in keeping the yet 
unsullied reputation of the army, and that the duties 
exacted of us by civilization and Christianity are not 
less obligatory in the country of the enemy than in our 
own. The Commanding General considers that no 
greater disgrace would befall the Army, and through it 
our. whole people, than the perpetration of the bar- 
barous outrages upon the innocent and defenceless 
and the wanton destruction of private property that 
have marked the course of the enemy in our own 
country. Such proceedings not only disgrace the 
perpetrators and all connected with them, but are 
subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army 
and obstructive to the ends of our present movements. 
It must be remembered that we make war only on 
armed men and that we cannot take vengeance for 
the wrong our people have suffered without lowering 
ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been 
excited by the atrocities of our enemy, and offending 
against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without 
whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in 
vain. 

The Commanding General, therefore, earnestly 
exhorts the troops to abstain with most scrupulous care 
from unnecessary or wanton injury to private property, 



LEE'S CLEMENCY 173 

and he enjoins upon all officers to arrest and bring to 
summary punishment all who shall in any way offend 
against the orders on this subject. 

R. E. Lee, 

General. 

Colonel Freemantle of the British Army, who 
was along with the army, says: "I saw no strag- 
gling into the houses; nor were any of the in- 
habitants disturbed or annoyed by the soldiers. 
I went into Chambersburg and witnessed the 
singular good behavior of the troops toward the 
citizens. To one who has seen the ravages of 
the Northern troops in Southern towns this for- 
bearance seems most commendable and sur- 
prising." 

It is a record of general and of men of which 
the South may well be proud* 



CHAPTER XI 

GETTYSBURG 

pOSSIBLY, one other fault in Lee as a soldier 
may appear to some: that he accounted the 
abihties of the opposing armies at less than their 
true value. Study of the war must lead to the 
conviction that neither courage nor fortitude-was 
the monopoly of either side. The men who with- 
stood at Malvern Hill the fierce charges of the 
Southern infantry; the men who marched down 
the rolling plain of Second Manassas against 
Stonewall Jackson's lines of flame, and dashed 
like the surging sea, wave upon wave, on Lee's 
iron ranks at Antietam; the men who charged 
impregnable defences at Marye's Heights; the 
men who climbed the slippery steeps of Chatta- 
nooga and swept the crimson plain of Frankhn; 
the men who maintained their positions under 
the leaden sleet of the Wilderness and seized the 
Bloody Angle at Spottsylvania; the men who 
died at Cold Harbor, rank on rank, needed to 
ask no odds for valor of any troops on earth, not 
even of the men who followed Lee. 

174 



GETTYSBURG 175 

In a recent discussion of this subject, the 
philosophical Charles Francis Adams, himself 
a veteran of the Army of the Potomac, whose 
laurels were won in opposing Lee, quotes with 
approval Lee's proud declaration that, "there 
never were such men in an army before. They 
will go anywhere and do anything if properly 
led." "And for myself," he adds, "I do not 
think the estimate thus expressed was exag- 
gerated. Speaking deliberately, having faced 
some portions of the Army of Northern Virginia 
at the time, and having reflected much on the 
occurrences of that momentous period, I do not 
believe that any more formidable, or better 
organized and animated force was ever set in 
motion than that which Lee led across the Po- 
tomac in the early summer of 1863. It was es- 
sentially an army of fighters — men who individu- 
ally or in the mass could be depended upon for 
any feat of arms in the power of mere mortals 
to accomplish. They would blench at no dan- 
ger. This Lee, from experience, knew. He had 
tested them; they had full confidence in him."* 

Lee's error, such as it was, lay not in over- 
rating his own weapon, but in undervaluing 
the larger weapon of his antagonist. Yet, if 
this under-rating of his enemy was a fault it 

* Address at Lexington, Virginia, cited ante. 



176 ROBERT E. LEE 

was a noble one; and how often it led to victory! 
Lee's success was due largely to his splendid 
audacity. 

If, in attacking the redoubtable forces of 
Meade on the heights of Gettysburg, he over- 
estimated the ability of that army of sixty 
thousand Southern men who wore the gray, 
who can wonder ? In their rags and tatters, 
ill-shod and ill-armed, they were the flower of 
the South. Had he not seen them on every 
field since Mechanicsville ? Seen them, under 
his masterly tactics and inspiring eye, sweep 
McClellan's mighty army from the very gates 
of Richmond ? Seen them send Pope, routed 
and demoralized, to the shelter of the fortifica- 
tions around Alexandria ? Seen them repel 
McClellan's furious charges on the field of 
Antietam and hold him at bay with a fresh 
army at his back ? Seen them drive Burnside's 
valorous men back to their entrenchments } 
Seen them roll Hooker's great army up as a 
scroll and hurl it back across the Rappahan- 
nock ? What was disparity of numbers to him ? 
What strength of position ? His greatest vic- 
tories had been plucked by daring, which hith- 
erto fortune had proved the wisest of calculation, 
from the jaws of apparent impossibility. Be- 
sides, who knew so well as he the necessity of 



GETTYSBURG 177 

striking such a blow ? The Southwest was being 
gradually conquered. Vicksburg, the last strong- 
hold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi, was 
in the last throes of a fatal siege, and, on the 
same day that Lee faced his fate at the heights 
of Gettysburg, fell, and the Confederate South 
was cut in two. His delivering battle here under 
such conditions has been often criticised. He is 
charged with having violated a canon of war. 
He repKed to his critics once that even so dull a 
man as himself could see clearly enough his mis- 
takes after they were committed. 

This battle, now generally esteemed the cru- 
cial battle of the war, has been fought over 
so often and so fully that it is not necessary 
to go over its details now, and to do so is not 
within the scope of this volume, which only 
deals with Lee's military genius as borne evi- 
dence to by his audacity. Gettysburg was only 
one factor in the unbroken chain of proof to 
establish his boldness and his resolution. South- 
ern historians have unanimously placed the 
chief responsibility for his defeat on Longstreet, 
whose tendency to be dilatory and obstinate has 
been noted in connection with the fields of Seven 
Pines, Frazer's Farm and Second Manassas, 
and whose slowness and surliness now probably 
cost Lee this battle and possibly cost the South, 



178 ROBERT E. LEE 

if not its independence, at least the offer of 
honorable terms. And in this estimate of him 
many other competent critics concur. "Lee," 
says Henderson in his '' Life of Stonewall Jack- 
son," "lost the battle of Gettysburg because 
he allowed his second in command to argue 
instead of marching." * Lee, we know, held 
him in high esteem, speaking of him as his 
"old war horse," and was too magnanimous ever 
to give countenance to the furious clamor which 
later assailed his sturdy if opinionated and bull- 
headed lieutenant. Longstreet seems, indeed, 
to have been not unlike a bull, ponderous and 
dull until aroused, but once aroused by the 
sight of blood, terrible in his fury and a fero- 
cious fighter. But the question here is, did Lee 
err or not in fighting the battle. 

In brief, the battle of Gettysburg came of the 
necessity to "yield to a stronger power than 
General Burnside." Feeling the imperative 
necessity of relieving Virginia of the burden that 
was crushing her to the earth, Lee determined 
as the summer of 1863 drew near, to manoeuvre 
Hooker from his impregnable position on the 
Stafford Heights and to transfer the theatre 
of war to Northern soil. His army, though 
not large, was a veteran body who, properly 

* Vol. II, p. 488. 



GETTYSBURG 179 

led, would go anywhere and do anything they 
were ordered to do. Accordingly, in the first 
week of June (from the 3d to the 7th), Lee, 
leaving A. P. Hill to occupy the lines at Fred- 
ericksburg and cover Richmond, withdrew the 
major portion of his force to Culpeper, and 
directed them from there to the Shenandoah 
Valley, which he immediately cleared of the 
enemy, capturing in the several engagements 
fought in his advance from Culpeper to Win- 
chester, over 4,000 men, 29 pieces of artillery 
and many stores. 

As he anticipated, his strategy drew Hooker 
back toward the Potomac, and Longstreet was 
moved forward on the eastern side of the Blue 
Ridge, while A. P. Hill followed Ewell over the 
mountains into the Valley of Virginia, the whole 
being screened by Stuart's cavalry. 

By the middle of the month (June) Lee's ad- 
vanced corps had crossed the Potomac and Long- 
street was ordered soon afterward to do the same, 
while Stuart was left to impede Hooker should 
he attempt to follow across the Potomac, it being 
left to Stuart's discretion whether to cross east 
or west of the Blue Ridge; but on crossing he 
was to cover the right of the army. On the 
2 1 St, Ewell was ordered to advance in the direc- 
tion of Harrisburg, and he reached Carlisle on 



i8o ROBERT E. LEE 

the 27th. On the same day Longstreet and A. 
P. Hill reached the vicinity of Chambersburg. 
Up to this time no information had come from 
any source of the crossing of the Potomac by 
the Federal army, and it was not until the 28th 
that Lee was apprised by one of his scouts that 
the army had crossed several days before and 
was near South Mountain. Lee promptly de- 
cided to concentrate his forces on the east of the 
mountains, and Hill was ordered to Cashtown, 
to the north-westward of Gettysburg, to which 
place a turnpike ran, with Longstreet following 
next day. 

On the morning of the 30th, Pettigrew's 
brigade, of Heth's division, was ordered to the 
little town of Gettysburg, a few miles away, to 
get shoes and other supplies of which it stood 
sorely in need, and found it occupied by the 
enemy, who were not known to be nearer than 
fifteen miles away. General Lee having arrived 
at Cashtown on the morning of July ist, Heth 
was sent to ascertain the force of the enemy, but 
was ordered if he found infantry in force to re- 
port the fact and not force an engagement. At 
this time Hill had two divisions up and the 
third not far in the rear, and Ewell was on his 
way, having been ordered to recall his divisions 
and concentrate about Cashtown. Before long 



GETTYSBURG i8i 

the sound of artillery from the direction of Get- 
tysburg gave evidence that an engagement v^as 
on, and General Lee, accompanied by Hill, 
hastened to the front, where they found that 
the enemy's artillery and infantry, who were 
present in considerable force, had driven Heth's 
two advanced brigades back, and the whole 
division was now hotly engaged. 

This was the beginning of the famous three 
days' battle of Gettysburg; for from this time 
on the conflict continued with only the inter- 
missions due to darkness and the need for fresh 
troops. Heth's division would have paid dearly 
for their shoes had not Ewell learned that 
morning that Hill was moving toward Gettys- 
burg and headed his column in that direction, 
and had not Rhodes, whose division was in the 
lead, caught the sound of guns and pushed for- 
ward, "making his dispositions" for the battle 
as he hurried on. Even when he reached the 
field he found the force before him so strong 
that he was glad to hold his own, and it was 
not until Early reached the field and put in his 
division on the left that they forced back the 
enemy's right, as Pender, rushing to Heth's re- 
lief, made good his advance and the enemy were 
driven in disorder from the field, through the 
town and on beyond to the heights where one of 



i82 ROBERT E. LEE 

Steinwehr's brigades of the Eleventh Corps lay 
in reserve. It v^as a stubborn and bloody con- 
flict, with from tv^enty-two thousand to twenty- 
four thousand men on either side, and while it 
resulted in a clear victory for the Confederate 
troops, who not only swept the field but capt- 
ured some 5,000 prisoners, the loss on both 
sides was heavy. General Lee, who was an eye- 
witness of the victory, sent his adjutant-general 
with a message to Ewell to say that "from the 
position he occupied he could see the enemy 
retreating over those hills without organization 
and in great confusion, and that it was only 
necessary to press those people in order to se- 
cure possession of the heights and that, if pos- 
sible, he wished him to do this." * General 
Ewell, however, "deemed it unwise to make the 
pursuit," for fear, probably, as Taylor con- 
jectures, of bringing on a general engagement. 
However this was, the pursuit was not pressed, 
though Gordon, who was in the full tide of 
victory, required three or four orders "of the 
most peremptory character" before he stayed 
his eager troops. 

Ewell halted his men on the field, and that 
night the Federals fortified the heights and as 
new troops came pouring in by forced marches, 

♦Taylor's "General Lee," p. 190. 



GETTYSBURG 183 

the lines were rapidly strengthened with en- 
trenchments. At this time the commanding 
position of Gulp's Hill was unoccupied. Han- 
cock states that he ordered Wadsworth's division 
and a battery to take position there in the 
afternoon. But two of Ewell's staff officers 
reported to him that they were on the hill at 
dark. 

Meade, at Taneytown, Maryland, thirteen 
miles away, with the Second Corps, received 
Hancock's report of the situation that after- 
noon, and, issuing orders with a promptness 
which bore rich fruit, he marched for the 
heights commanding the battlefield, where he 
arrived at i in the morning. There was discus- 
sion as to the availability of the position and 
Meade at one time thought of withdrawing 
from it. The Fifth Corps, that evening, was at 
Union Mills, twenty-three miles away, and the 
Sixth Corps was at Manchester, thirty-four 
to thirty-six miles away. Lee's army lay close 
to the battle-field, and might attack before his 
troops got up or might interpose between him 
and Washington.* Longstreet says he himself 
opposed further fighting there. 

Lee, however, was ready for the fight and be- 
lieved he could destroy Meade in detail. He 

* Meade to Halleck. Dispatch, 2 p. m., July 2, 1863. 



i84 ROBERT E. LEE 

had a talk with Longstreet on Seminary Ridge 
that afternoon at 5 o'clock, and that evening he 
held a conference in the captured town of Get- 
tysburg with Ewell, Early and Rhodes; where it 
was determined that Longstreet, whose troops 
were only four miles away, should begin the 
battle in the morning, by seizing the com- 
manding positions on the enemy's left and thus 
be enabled to enfilade Meade's flank, while he 
was attacked by Hill and Early. Lee left the 
conference to give the order, and that night 
told General Wm. N. Pendleton, his chief of 
artillery, that he "had ordered General Long- 
street to attack on the flank at sunrise next 
morning." * At daybreak Lee himself was 
ready and waiting for the battle to begin; but 
Longstreet, who the evening before had been 
averse to attacking, says he sought him out 
again at daybreak and renewed his views 
against making the attack on this side, an ex- 
postulation which caused Lee to send a staff 
oflBcer to Ewell to ascertain whether, after exam- 
ining the position by daylight, he could not 
attack. The position In front of Ewell was, 
however, now too strongly fortified to make an 
assault possible, and Meade in contemplation of 

* "Life of General Wm. N. Pendleton," by S. P. Lee. 
Fitzhugh Lee's "Lee." 



GETTYSBURG 185 

assuming the offensive, was massing his forces 
there. Lee even then rode himself to confer 
with Ewell, but finding what the situation was, 
adhered to his original decision and ordered 
Longstreet at 11 o'clock to attack as already 
directed. 

Even then, however, Longstreet held back — 
whether from obstinacy and refractoriness, or 
because "his heart was not in it" longer, or 
because he felt the situation hopeless — the two 
former of which reasons have been charged 
against him, and the last of which has been 
claimed by him, has ever been a question hotly 
debated. However it was, though his troops, 
except one brigade. Law's, were encamped close 
to the battlefield, he failed to move until half 
the day had been lost, because, as he said, he 
hated to go into battle with one boot of^; and 
when he moved. Round Top was fully protected. 
Meade had changed his plan of attacking with 
his right and had strengthened his left; Sedg- 
wick's corps, the Sixth, had come up after an 
epoch-making march of thirty-six miles since 
9 o'clock the night before and was in position 
while Longstreet sulked and dawdled with his 
eager troops awaiting orders on the edge of the 
battlefield. 

Even as it was, in the furious battle which 



i86 ROBERT E. LEE 

took place that afternoon when Longstreet at 
last began to fight, Lee seized Big Round Top, 
held it for some time, and passed beyond it; 
turned Sickles's left and made a lodgment on 
Little Round Top, behind which Sedgwick's 
Sixth Corps, white with the dust of their thirty- 
six miles march, was massed on the Taneytown 
road; which Meade declared "the key-point 
of his whole position," and held it with his 
brave Alabamians until driven back by the Fifth 
Corps, massed for the purpose, and this, if 
held, would, Meade states, "have prevented him 
from holding any of the ground he subse- 
quently held to the last." At nightfall Lee had 
secured possession of the important position 
known as "The Devil's Den," the Ridge on the 
Emmitsburg Pike, made lodgment on the bases 
of both Round Tops; made an impression on 
the Federal centre, and had occupied a portion 
of the works on the Federal right.* It was 
enough to lead Lee to report that the conditions 
"induced the belief, that with proper concert of 
action, and with the increased support that the 
positions gained on the right would enable the 
artillery to render the assaulting columns, we 

* Cf. Fitzhugh Lee's "Life of Lee." 

Lieutenant-Colonel Henderson's Review of General Long- 
street's "From Manassas to Appomattox," cited ante; General 
Humphrey's "Gettysburg Campaign." 



GETTYSBURG 187 

should ultimately succeed, and it was accord- 
ingly determined to continue the attack." * 

Longstreet at Gettysburg is a subject that few 
Southerners can contemplate with philosophic 
calm. It used to be common soon after the war 
for old Confederate officers to declare that he 
should have been shot immediately after the 
battle, and that Napoleon would certainly have 
done so. But Lee was cast in a different mould. 
Of all his army he possibly knew most fully 
how absolutely Longstreet had frustrated his 
plans, and certainly of all he treated him with 
most leniency. But while he was assuming the 
burden of the responsibility and wrote Long- 
street the affectionate letters of an old brother 
in arms who knew his worth and overlooked his 
errors, Longstreet, with what was not far from 
ingratitude, was placing on Lee the blame for 
his own shortcoming and was claiming that had 
he been allowed to dictate the plan of the cam- 
paign the result would have been different. 

After General Lee was in his honored grave, 
Longstreet published his own defence, in which he 
undertook to prove that Lee had made eleven 
grave errors in the precipitation and conduct of 
the battle of Gettysburg. He says that he op- 
posed fighting the battle of Gettysburg and that 

* Lee's Report. 



i88 ROBERT E. LEE 

when he, on the evening of the ist, gave his 
opinion to General Lee that they could not 
have called the enemy to a position better 
suited to their plans, and that all they had to do 
was to file round his left and secure good ground 
between him and his capital, he was astonished 
at Lee's impatience, and his vehement declara- 
tion, "If he is there to-morrow, I will attack 
him," and thereupon he observes, "His des- 
perate mood was painfully evident and gave 
rise to serious apprehensions." All of which 
was written long afterward and as a defence 
against the quite general and serious criticism 
of his own conduct as the cause of Lee's failure. 
But why should Lee have been in a desperate 
mood ? He had an army on which he knew he 
could count to do anything if they were prop- 
erly led. He had gone into the North to fight; 
he had just seen a part of his force roll two fine 
army corps, fighting furiously, back through the 
town and over the heights, in confusion, leaving 
in his hands 5,000 captives, and. he knew that 
the bulk of the Federal army was from four to 
nine times as far from the field as his own corps. 
His reason for fighting next morning was, 
therefore, not his desperation, but his appar- 
ently well-grounded hope that he should win a 
battle before Meade could concentrate, and 



GETTYSBURG 189 

then be in a position to force terms. His posi- 
tion has commended itself to clear-headed sol- 
diers since,* and the criticism of it is retroactive 
and based on events which should not have 
occurred and in all human probability would 
not, but for Longstreet's slowness if not his 
bull-headedness. 

Lee, as he waited next morning for Long- 
street to move forward, gave Hood, who had 
been on the ground since daybreak, his chief 
reason for fighting. "The enemy is here," he 
said, "and if we don't whip him he will whip 
us." It was a sound reason and has been ap- 
proved by good critics, and had Longstreet not 
dallied or sulked for more than half the day, it 
might have been justified before dark fell on 
the night of the 2d of July. As we see Long- 
street, fooling away the hours while spade and 
shovel rang along the green crest piling up the 
earthworks, and while Sedgwick's Sixth Corps, 
hot-footed, pushed along the dusty roads, telling 
off the long miles hour after hour, we may well 
understand how different the result would have 
been had but Stonewall Jackson commanded 
that day the bronzed and eager divisions lying all 

* Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. R. Henderson's review of Long- 
street's "From Manassas to Appomattox." "Journal of Royal 
United States Inst.," October, 1897. 



190 ROBERT E. LEE 

morning with stacked arms awaiting orders. 
Doubtless it was this that was in Lee's mind 
when, long afterward, he said, "If I had had 
Jackson at Gettysburg, as far as human reason 
can see, I should have won a great victory." 

The next day Lee assaulted and was repelled 
in what is known to soldiers as the third day's 
battle; but his defeat was accomplished in the 
first half of the preceding day, when Longstreet 
failed to carry out his orders, and the golden 
opportunity was lost. 

As the scope of this discussion includes only 
the question of Lee's ability as a general in 
offensive operations, it is not within its province 
to go further into the details of this great battle, 
except to show that on this day Longstreet 
again delayed and faltered, and that this time 
his slowness destroyed finally all possibility of 
success. This cannot be better shown than by 
quoting from the illuminating review of his book 
by Lieutenant-Colonel, afterward Brigadier- 
General, G. F. R. Henderson, already cited. 

"His conduct on the third day," declares this 
critic, "opens up a still graver issue. The First 
Army Corps when at length, on the afternoon 
of July 2d, it was permitted to attack, had 
achieved a distinct success. The enemy was 
driven back to his main position with enormous 



GETTYSBURG 191 

loss. On the morning of July 3d, Lee deter- 
mined to assault that position in front and flank, 
simultaneously; and, according to his chief of 
the staff, Longstreet's corps was to make the 
main attack on the centre, while the Second 
Corps attacked the right. But again there was 
delay, and this time it was fatal. . . . We may 
note that according to Longstreet's own testi- 
mony the order (to attack) was given soon after 
sunrise, and yet, although the Second Corps 
attacking the Federal right became engaged at 
daylight, it was not until i p. m., eight hours 
later, that the artillery of the First Corps 
opened fire, and not till 2 p. m. that the infantry 
advanced. Their assault was absolutely iso- 
lated. The Second Corps had already been 
beaten back. The Third Corps, although a 
division who were ready to move to any point 
to which Longstreet might indicate, was not 
called upon for assistance. Two divisions of 
his own corps, posted on the right flank, did 
absolutely nothing, and after a supremely gal- 
lant effort the 15,000 men who were hurled 
against the front of the Federal army, and some 
of whom actually penetrated the position, were 
repulsed with fearful slaughter." 

After discussing in detail Longstreet's tactics 
and action, this thoughtful critic adds: "But 



192 ROBERT E. LEE 

the crucial question is this: Why did he delay 
his attack for eight hours, during which time the 
Second Corps with which he was to cooperate 
was heavily engaged ? If he moved only under 
compulsion, if he deliberately forebore to use 
his best efforts to carry out Lee's design, and to 
compel him to adopt his own, the case is very 
different. That he did so seems perfectly clear." 
*'If Lee was to blame at all in the Gettysburg 
campaign," adds Henderson, "it was in taking 
as his second in command a general who was so 
completely indifferent to the claim of discipline." 
Had Lee's orders been obeyed, he would 
probably have won the battle of Gettysburg. 
He must have won it on the 2d of July, when 
he had " a fine opportunity of dealing with the 
enemy in detail"; he might have won it even 
on the 3d. But fate, that decides the issues of 
nations, decreed otherwise. The crown of Ceme- 
tery Ridge, seized and held for twenty minutes 
by that devoted band of gray-clad heroes, marks 
the highest tide, not of Confederate valor but 
of Confederate hope. Even so, it appeared at 
first but a drawn battle. The Army of North- 
ern Virginia had struck Meade so terrible a 
blow that, as Halleck testified before the Com- 
mission on the Conduct of the War, a council 
was held to decide whether they should retreat. 



GETTYSBURG 193 

All that day the two armies lay on the opposite 
hills like spent lions nursing their wounds, 
neither of them able to attack the other. Next 
day, Lee, with ammunition-chests nearly ex- 
hausted, fell slowly back to the Potomac, cautious- 
ly followed by his antagonist, and after waiting 
quietly for its swollen waters to subside recrossed 
into Virginia. It was a defeat, for Lee had failed 
of his purpose. But it was a defeat which bare- 
ly touches his fame as a captain. No other 
captain or army in history might have done 
more. 

The gallant and high-minded Meade was a 
little later superseded by his Government in 
favor of the victorious Grant and loyally served 
under him as commander of the Army of the 
Potomac to the end; but at the South, neither 
Lee nor his heroic army ever stood higher with 
the authorities or the southern people. His 
very defeat seems even now but the pedestal 
for a more exalted heroism. With a magna- 
nimity too sublime for common men wholly to 
appreciate, he took all the blame for the failure 
on himself. History has traversed his unselfish 
statement and has placed the blame where it just- 
ly belongs : on those who failed to carry out the 
plan his genius had conceived. 

Moved possibly by the criticism of the oppo- 



194 ROBERT E. LEE 

sition press, for there was ever a hostile and 
intractable press attacking the Government 
of the Confederacy and reviling all its w^orks, 
Lee wrote to Mr. Davis and proposed that he 
should be relieved by some younger and possibly 
more efficient man. His bodily strength was 
failing, he said, and he was dependent on the 
eyes of others. Mr. Davis promptly reassured 
him in a letter which goes far to explain the 
personal loyalty to him, not only of Lee, but of 
the South. 

These letters give a picture of the two men in 
their relation to each other and to the cause 
they represented, and should be read in full by 
all who would understand the character of the 
two leaders of the Confederacy. 

Lee's letter was as follows: 

Camp Orange, August ^, 1863. 

Mr. President: 

Your letters of the 28th of July and 2d of 
August have been received, and I have waited 
for a leisure hour to reply, but I fear that will 
never come. I am extremely obliged to you for 
the attention given to the wants of this Army, 
and the efforts made to supply them. Our ab- 
sentees are returning, and I hope the earnest 
and beautiful appeal made to the country in 



GETTYSBURG 195 

your proclamation may stir up the whole people 
and that they may see their duty and perform 
it. Nothing is wanted but that their fortitude 
should equal their bravery to insure the suc- 
cess of our cause. We must expect reverses, 
even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom 
and prudence, to call forth greater energies, 
and to prevent our falling into greater disasters. 
Our people have only to be true and united, to 
bear manfully the misfortunes incident to war, 
and all will come right in the end. I know how 
prone we are to censure, and how ready to 
blame others for the non-fulfilment of our ex- 
pectations. This is unbecoming in a generous 
people, and I grieve at its expression. The 
general remedy for the want of success in a 
military commander is his removal. This is 
natural, and in many instances proper; for no 
matter what may be the ability of the officer, if 
he loses the confidence of his troops, disaster 
must sooner or later ensue. 

I have been prompted by these reflections 
more than once since my return from Penn- 
sylvania to propose to your Excellency the pro- 
priety of selecting another commander for this 
Army. I have seen and heard of expressions of 
discontent in the public journals as the result of 
the expedition. I do not know how far this 



196 ROBERT E. LEE 

feeling extends to the Army. My brother offi- 
cers have been too kind to report it, and so far 
the troops have been too generous to exhibit it. 
It is fair, however, to suppose that it does exist, 
and success is so necessary to us that nothing 
should be left undone to secure it. I, therefore, 
in all sincerity, request your Excellency to take 
measures to supply my place. I do this with the 
more earnestness, because no one is more aware 
than myself of my inability to discharge the 
duties of my position. I cannot even accom- 
plish what I myself desire. How can I fulfil the 
expectations of others ^ In addition, I sensibly 
feel the growing failure of my bodily strength. 
I have not yet recovered from the attack I ex- 
perienced the past spring. I am becoming 
more and more incapable of exertion, and am 
thus prevented from making the personal ex- 
amination, and giving the supervision to the 
operations in the field which I feel to be 
necessary. I am so dull, that in undertaking 
to use the eyes of others I am frequently 
misled. 

Everything, therefore, points to the advantage 
to be derived from a new commander, and I 
the more anxiously urge the matter upon your 
Excellency from my belief that a younger and 
abler man than myself can be readily obtained. 



GETTYSBURG 197 

I know that he will have as gallant and brave an 
army as ever existed to second his efforts, and 
it v^ould be the happiest day of my life to see at 
its head a worthy leader — one that would ac- 
complish more than I can perform and all that 
I have wished. I hope your Excellency will 
attribute my request to the true reason — the 
desire to serve my country and to do all in my 
power to insure the success of her righteous 
cause. 

I have no complaints to make of any one but 
myself. I have received nothing but kindness 
from those above me, and the most considerate 
attention from my comrades and companions in 
arms. To your Excellency I am specially in- 
debted for uniform kindness and consideration. 
You have done everything in your power to aid 
me in the work committed to my charge with- 
out omitting anything to promote the general 
welfare. I pray that your efforts may at length 
be crowned with success, and that you may long 
live to enjoy the thanks of a grateful people. 
With sentiments of great esteem, I am, 

Very respectfully and truly yours, 
R. E. Lee. 
General. 
His Excellency Jefferson Davis, President Con- 
federate States. 



igS ROBERT E. LEE 

To this letter President Davis sent the follow- 
ing reply : 

Richmond, Va., August ii, 1863. 

Gen. R. E. Lee, Commanding Army of North- 
ern Virginia : 

Yours of the 8th inst. has just been received. 
I am glad that you concur so entirely with me 
as to the wants of our country in this trying 
hour, and am happy to add that after the first 
depression consequent upon our disasters in the 
West, indications have appeared that our peo- 
ple will exhibit that fortitude which we agree 
in believing is alone needed to secure ultimate 
success. 

It well became Sydney Johnston when over- 
whelmed by a senseless clamor to admit the 
rule that success is the test of merit; and yet 
there has been nothing which I have found to 
require a greater effort of patience than to bear 
the criticisms of the ignorant who pronounce 
everything a failure which does not equal their ex- 
pectations or desires, and can see no good result 
which is not in the line of their own imaginings. 

I admit the propriety of your conclusions that 
an officer who loses the confidence of his troops 
should have his position changed, whatever may 
be his ability; but when I read the sentence I 



GETTYSBURG 199 

was not at all prepared for the application you 
were about to make. Expressions of discontent 
in the public journals furnish but little evidence 
of the sentiment of the army. I wish it were 
otherwise, even though all the abuse of myself 
should be accepted as the results of honest ob- 
servation. Were you capable of stooping to it, 
you could easily surround yourself with those 
who would fill the press with your laudations, 
and seek to exalt you for what you had not done, 
rather than detract from the achievements 
which will make you and your army the subject 
of history and the object of the world's admira- 
tion for generations to come. 

I am truly sorry to know that you still feel the 
effects of the illness you suffered last spring, and 
can readily understand the embarrassments you 
experience in using the eyes of others, having 
been so much accustomed to make your own 
reconnaissances. Practice will, however, do 
much to relieve that embarrassment, and the 
minute knowledge of the country which you 
have acquired will render you less dependent 
for topographical information. 

But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to 
admit, with all their implications, the points 
which you present, where am I to find the new 
commander who is to possess the greater ability 



200 ROBERT E. LEE 

which you beheve to be required ? I do not 
doubt the readiness with which you would give 
way to one who could accompHsh all that you 
have wished, and you will do me the justice to 
believe that if Providence should kindly offer 
such a person for our use I would not hesitate 
to avail myself of his services. 

My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to dis- 
cover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have 
but used to you the language of sober earnest- 
ness when I have impressed upon you the pro- 
priety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to 
danger, because I felt our country could not 
bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute for 
you some one, in my judgment, more fit to com- 
mand or who would possess more of the confi- 
dence of the Army or of the reflecting men of 
the country, is to demand an impossibility. It 
only remains for me to hope that you will take 
all possible care of yourself, that your health 
and strength will be entirely restored, and that 
the Lord will preserve you for the important 
duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our 
suff'ering country for the independence which 
we have engaged in war to maintain. 

As ever, 

Very respectfully and truly, 

Jefferson Davis 



GETTYSBURG 201 

With these letters to portray the character of 
Lee, history will endorse with its infallible pen 
what the President of the Confederacy wrote: 
There was no better man to take his place. 

Though Lee failed of final success, to the 
student of history who weighs opportunities 
and compares resources, this in no wise mars his 
fame. He lay in the face of the enemy twenty- 
four hours and then, with the swollen Potomac 
at his back, brought off his army intact and 
undisspirited and proceeded to prepare for the 
next campaign. Indeed, with the Army of the 
Potomac in his front, he sent two divisions under 
Longstreet to reinforce Bragg and defeat Rose- 
crans at Chickamauga. When Meade crossed 
the Rappahannock into Culpeper, Lee ma- 
noeuvred so threateningly that Meade retired, 
and only the lack of shoes and equipment 
prevented Lee from again crossing the Po- 
tomac* 

The chief disaster of Gettysburg lay not so 
much in the first repulse of the intrepid lines, 
which, in the face of a constantly increasing 
storm of shot and shell, swept across that deadly 
plain and on up the flaming slopes of Cemetery 

♦Letter to Mrs. Lee, Oct. 19, 1863. Fitzhugh Lee's "Lee," 
P- 317- 



202 ROBERT E. LEE 

Ridge and Little Round Top, as in the conse- 
quences which were soon disclosed. 

The North was enabled to recruit her armies 
by drafting all the men she needed, and her 
command of the sea gave her Europe as a re- 
cruiting ground. On October 17, 1863, the 
President of the United States ordered a draft 
for 300,000 men. On February i, 1864, he 
called for 500,000, allowing a deduction for 
quotas filled under the preceding draft; and on 
March 14, 1864, he issued an additional call for 
200,000 more, "to provide an additional reserve 
for all contingencies." * 

The South was almost spent. Her spirit was 
unquenched, and was, indeed, unquenchable; 
but her resources both of treasure and men were 
well-nigh exhausted. Her levies for reserves 
of all men between fifteen and sixty drew from 
President Davis the lament that she was grind- 
ing the seed-corn of the Confederacy. Yet more 
significantly it satisfied the new General, who, 
with his laurels fresh from the dearly won heights 



* Under the first call 369,380 men were drawn, of whom 52,- 
288 paid commutation; under the second 259,575 men were 
drawn, of whom 32,678 paid commutation. Again on July 18, 
1864, a call was made for 500,000 more men, of whom 385,163 
were furnished; and on December 19, 1864, 300,000 more were 
called for and 211,755 were furnished. — Rhodes's "History," 
Vol. IV, p. 429, citing " Statistical Rec. Phisterer," pp. 6, 8, 9. 



GETTYSBURG 203 

of Missionary Ridge, succeeded (on March 12,) 
the high-minded Meade, in the command of the 
Union Army on the Potomac, that a poHcy of 
attrition was one, and possibly the only one, which 
must win in the end. Clear-headed, aggressive, 
and able, he began his campaign with this policy 
from which he never varied, though the attrition 
wore away two men in his own ranks for every 
one in Lee's army, and he found himself forced 
to abandon the line which he somewhat boast- 
fully declared he would fight it out on if it took 
all summer. 

Grant, acting on his policy of "persistent 
hammering'' (a phrase coined by him after the 
events which proved its effectiveness), and 
assured of vast levies and of a free hand to carry 
out his plan on his own line, no matter what the 
cost, crossed the Rapidan on the night of the 
3d of May, 1864. His army numbered over 
140,000 men of all arms — double the number 
that Lee commanded — and he had 318 field 
guns. His equipment was possibly the best that 
any army could boast that ever took the field. 
His baggage train would, as he states, have 
stretched in line to Richmond, sixty odd miles 
away. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN 

TF Grant had harbored any delusion that Lee 
was a general strong only in defensive opera- 
tions, he had reason quickly to be undeceived. 
Lee, who for reasons of his own, had permitted 
him to cross the river unopposed, waited until 
he had reached the tangles of the Wilderness, 
where his superiority in men and arms might 
prove less preponderant, and two days later, 
having called in his widely separated divisions, 
— separated for the want of subsistence — though 
he was outnumbered two to one* he threw him- 
self upon him, inflicting upon him losses be- 
fore which any other general who had yet com- 
manded the Army of the Potomac would have 
recrossed the river, and even Grant recoiled. 
For two days (the 5th and 6th) the battle raged, 
and Lee forced Grant, with losses of 17,666 
men,t from his direct line of march and led him 

* Rhodes's "History of The United States/' IV, p. 480. Hum- 
phrey's Va. Campaign of '64 and '65, p. 17. 

t The Century Co.'s " Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," 
IV, p. 182. 

204 



THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN 205 

to call on his Government for reinforcements. 
" Send to Belle Plain," he wrote on the loth, " all 
the infantry you can rake and scrape." And he 
needed them all. On the evening of the second 
day an attack similar to Jackson's at Chancel- 
lorsville v^as made on Grant's flank, and his left 
taken in reverse v^as driven back when an acci- 
dent similar to that which changed the issue of 
that day changed this day's issue. As Long- 
street, who commanded the advancing troops, 
rode down the plank-road accompanied by 
Generals Kershaw and Jenkins, a volley was 
poured into them by his own men, and Jenkins 
was killed and Longstreet dangerously wounded. 
It stopped the movement which otherwise might 
have forced Grant back across the Rapidan. 
Lee's forces were largely outnumbered, but to 
make good the diflPerence Lee offered at more 
than one critical moment to lead them in person. 
Officers and men alike refused to advance while 
he remained at a point of danger, and he was 
forced to the rear. But not only in the battle of 
the 6th, but also in the battle of the loth and in 
the furious fight at the "bloody angle," where, 
when his army was imperilled, he again rode for- 
ward to inspire his straining troops and was 
again driven by them to the rear, the fact that 
he had felt it necessary to place himself at their 



2o6 ROBERT E. LEE 

head called forth new efforts from the jaded 
soldiers and stirred them to redoubled valor. 

"These men, General," said Gordon, as he 
rode with him down the lines at Spottsylvania, 
where they rested for a moment prior to the final 
charge, "are the brave Virginians." Lee ut- 
tered no word. He simply removed his hat and 
passed bare-headed along the line. I had it 
from one who witnessed the act. "It was," 
said he, "the most eloquent address ever deliv- 
ered." And a few minutes later as the men ad- 
vanced to the charge, he heard a youth, as he ran 
forward crying and reloading his musket, shout 
through his tears that " any man who would not 

fight after what General Lee said was a 

coward." 

In no battle of the war did Lee's genius shine 
forth more brightly than in the great battle of 
Spottsylvania Court House, where, after the 
bloody battle of the Wilderness, he divined 
Grant's plans, and again cutting him off from 
the object of his desire, threw himself upon him 
in a battle whose fury may be gauged by the 
fact that the musketry fire continued in one un- 
broken roar for seventeen hours, and large trees 
were shorn down by the musket balls. 

By the evening of the 7th, while his staff were 
yet in darkness as to Grant's next move, Lee, 



THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN 207 

with his unerring sense of the soldier, had di- 
vined it, and he sent General Anderson with his 
division to relieve Stuart at Spottsylvania.* 
His adjutant-general, who was sent to apprise 
Stuart of the approach of the infantry, found 
him already engaged. The supports arrived 
just in time; for the cavalry had been driven 
back, and Grant already occupied the Court 
House, as he reported in his dispatch of the 8th. 
But Lee's promptness "deranged this part of 
the programme," driving him back and holding 
him off during a week's fierce fighting, when 
Grant, having lost 40,000 men, finding his 
enemy too obstinate and ready to die in the last 
ditch, drew off by the flank, toward the south- 
ward, whereupon Lee again headed him and 
facing him at Hanover Junction, forced him 
down the north bank of the Pamunkey to Han- 
over town. 

" Before the lines of Spottsylvania," says 
Swinton, "the Army of the Potomac had for 
twelve days and nights engaged in a fierce 
wrestle in which it had done all that valor may 
do to carry a position by nature and art impreg- 
nable. In this contest, unparalleled in its con- 
tinuous fury and swelling to the proportions of 
a campaign, language is inadequate to convey 

* Taylor's "General Lee," p. 238. 



2o8 ROBERT E. LEE 

an impression of the labors, fatigues and suffer- 
ings of those who fought by day, only to march 
by night from point to point of the long line, 
and renew the fight on the morrow. Above forty 
thousand men had already fallen in the bloody 
encounters of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania, 
and the exhausted army began to lose its spirits/' 

Such was the defence which Lee presented 
to his able antagonist, and his great army, after 
the exhaustion of the hungry winter of 'sixty-four. 
Had he not been ill and half delirious in his am- 
bulance when Grant attempted to cross the 
North Anna and failed to get his centre over 
after his two wings were across. Grant's star 
might have set on the banks of the North Anna 
instead of rising to its zenith at Appomattox. 
But Lee was suddenly stricken down, and while 
he was murmuring in his semi-delirium, "We 
must strike them — we must never let them pass 
us again," Grant, after the most anxious night of 
the war, drew back his wings and slowly moved 
down the Pamunkey to find Lee still across his 
path at the historic levels of Cold Harbor, where 
valor and constancy rose to their highest point. 

"I stood recently in the wood where Gregg's 
Texans put on immortality," wrote a Southern 
historian; "where Kershaw led three of his bri- 
gades in person to compensate them for the ab- 



THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN 209 

sence of the fourth."* It was this need to com- 
pensate their troops for want of reserves or 
equipment which so often led the generals of 
the Confederacy to the firing Hne. But it was 
a costly expedient. Four times, in what ap- 
peared the very hour of complete victory, the 
prize was stricken from the hand by the com- 
mander being shot from his saddle. First, 
when General Albert Sydney Johnston was 
slain at Shiloh, in the moment of victory. Next, 
when at Seven Pines Joseph E. Johnston was 
struck from his horse, and what might have 
proved a crushing defeat for McClellan was 
turned into an indecisive battle. Again, when 
Jackson was driving all before him at Chancel- 
lorsville, and fell like Wolff, victorious. And, 
finally, when in the Wilderness Longstreet was 
wounded and incapacitated at the critical mo- 
ment when victory hovered over his arms. 

It is related that on one occasion, Lee, being 
asked by his staff to leave during a battle one 
spot after another where he had posted himself, 
finally exclaimed, "I wish I knew where my 
place is on the battlefield. Wherever I go some 
one tells me it is not the place for me." 

In fact, so far from Lee being chiefly good in 

* Leigh Robinson's Address on the Wilderness Campaign, 
Memorial Volume: Army of Northern Virginia. 



210 ROBERT E. LEE 

defence, the quality of his mihtary spirit ap- 
pears to one who studies his career to have 
been distinctly aggressive, possibly even too 
aggressive. No captain ever knew better the 
value of a quarter of an hour or the importance 
of striking first when the enemy was preparing 
to deliver his blow. In truth, he was an ardent 
fighter, and possessed in an extraordinary 
degree the qualities of both physical and moral 
courage. Lee's personal daring was the talk 
of his army. "I hear on all sides of your ex- 
posing yourself," wrote one of his sons during 
the Wilderness campaign, urging him to be more 
careful for the sake of the cause. And again 
and again, at some moment of supreme crisis, 
as at the "bloody angle" at Spottsylvania, which 
Grant had seized and where he was massing 
his picked troops to the number of 50,000, he 
rode forward to put himself at the head of his ex- 
hausted troops to lead them in a charge on 
which hung the fate of his army. Yet, as Hen- 
derson says in discussing Lee's audacity in at- 
tacking with an inferior force McClellan's well- 
equipped army, secure in their entrenchments, 
"he was no hare-brained leader, but a profound 
thinker, following the highest principles of the 
military art." That this will be the final verdict 
of History there can be little doubt. 



THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN 211 

After crossing the Rapidan the advance of 
Grant by the flank was under almost continu- 
ous attack by Lee. "Measured by casualties/* 
says Rhodes, in his history of this campaign, 
"the advantage was with the Confederates." 
This far from expresses the real fact that Grant 
received a drubbing which, as Lee's Adjutant- 
General, Colonel Walter H. Taylor, said the 
next day in his note-book, would have sent any 
other general who had hitherto commanded the 
Union Army back in haste across the river. 
It was Grant's fortitude which saved him, and 
led him to tell General James H. Wilson that 
he would fight again. As Lee had assaulted 
at the Wilderness, so again at Spottsylvania he 
barred the way of his indomitable antagonist, 
and again and again forced the fighting, until, 
after holding him at the North Anna, where he 
offered battle, he had wedged Grant from his 
direct march on Richmond and forced him 
down the left bank of the Pamunkey, to end his 
direct march on Richmond at last on the doubly 
bloody field of Cold Harbor, the only battle 
which Grant declared afterward he would not 
have fought over again under the same circum- 
stances. 

Foiled in that campaign of his immediate ob- 
ject, and having lost more men than Lee had 



212 ROBERT E. LEE 

at any time in his entire army, Grant adopted 
a new line of attack, and secretly crossing to the 
south side of the James, which he might at any 
time have reached by water without the loss of a 
man, attempted to seize Petersburg, as McClel- 
lan had planned to do, by a coup, but, failing in 
his object, began to lay siege to that place with 
a view to cutting off Richmond from the South, 
a feat which he only accomplished after eight 
months' fighting, in which he lost over 60,000 
more men. 



CHAPTER XIII 

LEE AND GRANT 

T^ECESSARILY a comparison arises between 
the two captains who confronted each 
other in this great campaign of 1864. 

Grant's fame, when he was made lieutenant- 
general and came into Virginia, rested on the 
three great feats of Donelson, Vicksburg and 
Missionary Ridge. And to these three a fourth 
was added a year later, when at Appomattox, 
Lee, on the 9th of April, 1865, surrendered to 
him the starving remnant of the Army of North- 
ern Virginia, which the exigencies of the Con- 
federacy had held before Petersburg as in a vise 
till it had slowly perished. Current history has 
chosen to assign to Grant the greater praise for 
this last campaign, partly because he finally 
crushed Lee, but chiefly because it ended the 
war. And possibly the lasting fame of the suc- 
cessful captain will be based chiefly on this. It 
may be well, however, to recall the simple, but 
often overlooked, principle, that while success is 

without doubt the gauge of a general's ability, 

213 



214 ROBERT E. LEE 

this does not necessarily mean final success. 
History shines with the names of generals who 
have failed at last and have yet borne off the 
palm in the great contest in which Fame is the 
reward. Hannibal was not the less the superior 
of Scipio Africanus because the latter finally 
conquered him and saved Rome. Charles XH. 
was not the less a greater captain than Peter's 
forgotten general because the latter drove him 
from Russia to seek an asylum in Turkey. Nor 
was Napoleon inferior to Wellington though he 
died defeated and a prisoner, while Wellington 
became prime minister and first citizen of the 
England he had been so capable and fortunate 
as to save. 

A captain's rank must be measured by his 
opportunities and the manner in which he uses 
them. That Grant was a general of rare abil- 
ity, clear-headed, capable, far-sighted, single- 
minded, prompt, resourceful, resolute even to 
obstinacy, no one who studies his campaigns 
will deny; that he was the equal of Lee in that 
high combination of these and other qualities 
which go to make up the greatest soldier, no 
one who studies with open mind the campaign 
of 1864 may successfully affirm. 

The heroic manner in which Lee with his 
half-starved veterans sustained the repeated 



LEE AND GRANT 215 

shocks of the " persistent hammering" of Grant's 
great army through so long a period must ever 
be a cause of wonder to the true student of his- 
tory, and the key will only be found by him 
who, looking beyond mere natural forces, shall 
consider the power that, springing from love of 
country, animates the breast of those who, firm 
in their conviction of right, fight on their own 
soil for their homes and their firesides. Study 
of the subject has, at least, convinced one writer, 
who has desired to give the truth and nothing 
but the truth, that never has there been such an 
army led by such a leader. Grant's persistent 
hammering, as attritive as it was, was far less so 
than the attrition of hunger and want. Lee, 
who early in the war had sighed for a force of 
veteran troops to whom to confide the trust, had 
long been at the head of the most experienced 
veterans who ever fought on American soil. 
He believed in his soul that they would go any- 
where where properly led. But he was too 
clear-eyed a soldier not to know that the most 
veteran legions that ever followed the eagles of 
Rome or France or the flag of the Confederacy 
must be shod and fed or they could not fight. 
From the first there had been difficulty in the 
equipment of the troops, owing to the absence 
of manufactories of even elementary articles. 



2i6 ROBERT E. LEE 

The arms were largely of the oldest and most 
obsolete kind; and many troops were armed 
with old muskets roughly changed from flint- 
locks to percussion; saddles were wanting to 
the cavalry, and swords were made on country 
forges.* Artillery had to be mounted on farm 
wagons; f and uniforms were woven on coun- 
try looms. This deficiency was in time partially 
overcome by captures from the enemy, and by 
blockade-running; but the matter of subsistence 
of the army was one which always caused grave 
alarm and serious and, at last, fatal trouble. 
The means of transportation were so limited 
that any break in even one line of railway was 
a perilous loss and the absence of manufactories 
contributed to frustrate Lee's boldest designs. 

In October, 1863, after Gettysburg, Lee 
writes of his troops : " If they had been properly 
provided with clothes I would certainly have 
endeavored to have thrown them north of the 
Potomac; but thousands were barefooted; 
thousands with fragments of shoes, and all 
without coats, blankets or warm clothing. I 
could not bear to expose them to certain suffer- 
ing on an uncertain issue." J 

* "Life of Forrest," by Dr. John A. Wyeth. 

t "Life of General Wm. N. Pendleton," by S. P. Lee. 

X Letter to Mrs. Lee, October 19, 1863. 



LEE AND GRANT 217 

Again on October 28th he writes to his wife: 
" I am glad you have some socks for the Army. 
Send them to me. Tell the girls to send all 
they can. I wish they could make some shoes, 
too. We have thousands of barefooted men. 
There is no news. General Meade, I believe, 
is repairing the railroads and I presume will 
come on again. If I could only get some shoes 
and clothes for the men I would save him the 
trouble." 

In the preceding winter, lying before Fred- 
ericksburg, he writes that his army is suffering 
so that he "may have to yield to a stronger 
force than General Burnside." 

Could anything be more tragic than this gen- 
eral bound in his trenches by the nakedness of 
his army, while his opponent prepared to over- 
whelm him! Or could anything be more pa- 
thetic than this general of an army acting as re- 
ceiver of a few dozen pairs of socks knitted for 
his barefooted army by his invalid wife! Not 
merely here, but from now on he acts as dis- 
penser of the socks knitted by her busy needles. 
Truly, the South may well point with pride to 
her gifted son, who in his head-quarters in a 
"nice pine thicket," showed such antique sim- 
plicity of character. 

An historian of the Wilderness campaign, in 



2i8 ROBERT E. LEE 

a remarkable study of that campaign, has called 
attention to an unconsciously pathetic phrase 
used by Lee in relation to his cavalry: Now 
that "the grass is springing," he says he hopes 
to be able to use his cavalry effectively.* 

By the beginning of the year 1864, the sub- 
sistence of the army had become almost impos- 
sible. "Many of the infantry," writes General 
Lee in an official communication, "are without 
shoes, and the cavalry worn down by the pur- 
suit of Averill. We are now issuing to the troops 
a fourth of a pound of salt meat, and have only 
three days' supply at that rate. Two droves of 
cattle from the West that were reported to be 
for this army, I am told have been directed to 
Richmond. I can learn of no supply of meat on 
the road to the army, and fear I shall be unable 
to retain it in the field." f 

In another official letter to the Commissary- 
General, he writes: "I regret very much to 
learn that the supply of beef for the army is so 
nearly exhausted. . . . No beef has been issued 
to the cavalry corps by the chief commissary 
that I am aware of for eighteen months. Dur- 
ing that time it has supplied itself, and has now, 

* Leigh Robinson in the Memorial Volume of the Army of 
Northern Virginia. 

t Letter to President Davis, January 2, 1864. 



LEE AND GRANT 219 

I understand, sufficient to last until the middle 
of February/' * 

Two weeks later he writes the Quarter- 
master-General as follows: "General: The 
want of shoes and blankets in this army con- 
tinues to cause much suffering and to impair its 
efficiency. In one regiment I am informed there 
are only fifty men with serviceable shoes, and a 
brigade that recently went on picket was com- 
pelled to leave several hundred men in camp 
that were unable to bear the exposure of duty, 
being destitute of shoes and blankets." f 

He thereupon urges that instead of trusting 
to the precarious supplies procured by running 
the blockade, the South should spare no efforts 
to develop her own resources. 

But the time had passed when the South could 
develop her resources, and it was soon to come 
when even the precarious supply by blockade- 
running was to cease altogether. 

On the 24th of January he wrote his wife: 
" . . . I have had to disperse the cavalry as 
much as possible to obtain forage for their 
horses, and it is that which causes trouble. 
Provisions for the men, too, are very scarce, and 

* Letter to Colonel L. B. Northrop, Commissary-General, 
January 5, 1864. 

t Letter to Brigadier-General R. A. Lawton, Quartermaster 
General, January 18, 1864. 



220 ROBERT E. LEE 

with very light diet and Hght clothing I fear 
they suffer. But still they are cheerful and un- 
complaining. I received a report from one di- 
vision the other day in which it stated that over 
four hundred men were barefooted and over one 
thousand without blankets. ..." 

Such was the condition of the army in the 
depth of the winter of 1 863-1 864, and it steadily 
grew worse. By the opening of spring Lee stood 
face to face with the gravest problem that can 
confront a general, the impossibility of subsisting 
his army, and moreover his own strength was 
waning, although he was yet to put forth the 
supreme eflFort which was to make his defence 
of Virginia against Grant possibly the greatest 
defensive campaign in history. In a letter to 
his eldest son, expressing his hearty acquiescence 
in an order substituting a chief engineer in place 
of his son for whom he had applied, wishing 
to make him chief of staff, he says: "I thought 
that position presented less objections to your 
serving with me than any other. ... I want 
all the aid I can get, now. I feel a marked 
change in my strength since my attack last spring 
at Fredericksburg, and am less competent for 
my duty than ever." * 

All through the spring, with undimmed 

* Letter of April 6, 1864. 



LEE AND GRANT 221 

vision, he had foreseen the tragic fate awaiting 
him, and his letters show plainly how clear this 
vision was, yet never once does he show aught 
but the same heroic constancy which had dis- 
tinguished him in the past. *'In none of them,'' 
says Long, "does he show a symptom of de- 
spair, or breathe a thought of giving up the con- 
test. To the last, he remained full of resources, 
energetic and defiant, and ready to bear on his 
own shoulders the whole burden of the conduct 
of the war." * 

In March, when lying opposite Grant's great 
army on the Rapidan, he wrote the President of 
the indication that Grant was concentrating a 
great force to operate in Virginia. And on 
April 6th, he writes of the great efforts that, 
according to all the information he received, 
were to be made in Virginia. A week later he 
writes him again : 

Head-quarters, April 12, 1864. 

Mr. President: My anxiety on the subject 
of provisions for the Army is so great that I can- 
not refrain from expressing it to your Excellency. 
I cannot see how we can operate with our pres- 
ent supplies. Any derangement in their arrival, 
or disaster to the Railroad, would render it im- 

* Long's "Lee." 



222 ROBERT E. LEE 

possible for me to keep the Army together, and 
might force a retreat into North Carolina. 
There is nothing to be had in this section for 
men or animals. We have rations for the 
troops to-day and to-morrow. . . . Every ex- 
ertion should be made to supply the depots at 
Richmond and at other points. ... I am, 
with great respect, your obedient servant, 

R. E. Lee, General. 

Three weeks later in a letter stating the 
movements of Grant's troops along the Rappa- 
hannock, and the signs of "large preparations 
on the part of the enemy and a state of readi- 
ness for action," he adds, *'If I could get back 
Pickett, Hoke and B. R. Johnson, I would feel 
strong enough to operate. ... I cannot get 
the troops together for want of forage and 
am looking for grass." It was a tragic situa- 
tion. Three days later, on the night of May 3, 
1864, Grant crossed the Rapidan with an 
army of over 140,000 men, many of them vet- 
eran troops, as brave men as ever carried a 
musket — armed and equipped in a manner 
unsurpassed, if equalled, in the annals of war, 
officered by the flower of the North. He 
had also 318 guns and a wagon-train that, 
stretched in a line, would have reached to 



LEE AND GRANT 223 

Richmond.* He controlled, with the aid of the 
exceedingly efficient navy, the York and the 
James to Dutch Gap, where Butler lay with 
an army which could spare him 10,000 men, 
to help in the deadly assaults at Cold Harbor, 
and a few days later could carry the formi- 
dable outer defences of Petersburg. 

To meet this force, Lee had 62,000 men and 
but 224 guns. His army was less efficiently 
armed and with an equipment which would have 
been hopelessly insufficient for any other army 
than the one he commanded: the war-worn 
veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, 
inured to hunger and hardship and battle. 

On the 1 2th day of June, when Grant crossed 
the James to the south side, of the 140,000 men 
who had crossed the Rapidan one month and 
nine days before he had lost 60,000 men, 
almost as many men as Lee had had during 
the campaign. On the 9th of April follow- 
ing, when Lee surrendered. Grant's losses had 
mounted up to 124,000, two men for every man 
that Lee had in his army at any time. By this 
record judge the two captains. 

* "The Army immediately opposed to Lee numbered, when it 
crossed the Rapidan, on May 4th, 1864, 149,166 men. While Lee 
had within call 62,000, but with only half that number he moved 
on and attacked Grant's army in the Wilderness." Jones's "Life 
and Letters of R. E. Lee," p. 310. 



224 ROBERT E. LEE 

The adverse criticism of Grant as a captain 
of the first rank is based on the charge that he 
sacrificed over 50,000 men to reach the James, 
v^hen he might have reached the south side of 
James River and laid siege to Petersburg and 
Richmond vs^ithout the loss of a man.* As to 
w^hether, had he done this, he could have suc- 
ceeded in the destruction of Lee's army, the im- 
pregnable defence of the Confederate Capital, 
can never be known. It v^as necessary for him 
not only to defeat Lee, but at the same time pro- 
tect Washington, failure to do v^hich had cost 
McClellan his place. His policy of " persistent 
hammering," no matter what the cost, won out 
in the end; for while the attrition wore away 
the thin gray line, which, stretched from Rich- 
mond to Petersburg, ever grew thinner, the 
drafts for the ranks of the Union ever grew 
larger. 

No one knew so well as Lee the disastrous 
consequences of this policy of attrition. From 
August on his letters express plainly his recog- 

* Grant's losses, from May 4th, when he crossed the Rapidan, 
to June 1 2th, when staggering back from Cold Harbor he abandoned 
his first plan of attack and crossed to the south side of the J ames, 
was, according to the Union authorities, 54,929. (Rhodes's "His- 
tory," Vol. IV, p. 447. The Century Co.'s " Battles and Leaders 
of the Civil War," Vol. IV, p. 182.) And among these were the 
flower of his army, as gallant ofBcers and men as ever faced death 
on a battlefield. 



LEE AND GRANT 225 

nition of the terrible fact that his army was 
wearing down without the hope of his losses 
being repaired.* His soldierly prevision en- 
abled him to predict precisely what afterward oc- 
curred: the extension of Grant's lines to envelop 
him, and the consequent loss of Richmond, f 

Applause has been accorded Grant because 
he slipped away from Lee and crossed to the 
south side of the James without molestation. 
It was a capital piece of work. In truth, how- 
ever, he failed absolutely in the immediate object 
of this movement: the securing, as he wrote 
Halleck, of the city of Petersburg, by a coup 
before the Confederates could get there in much 
force. { 

The design of Grant to capture Petersburg, 
and by cutting off Richmond from the South 
force the capitulation of the Confederate Capital, 
was undoubtedly able strategy and why it had 
not been attempted by him before seems even 
now somewhat singular, for McClellan had urged 
it in July 1862, and a dash had been made to 
seize Richmond from this side by a daring raid 
which, possibly, had failed only because of a rise 
in James River which prevented the raiding party 

♦Letter to Secretary of War, August 23, 1864. Letter to Presi- 
dent Davis, September 2d, 1864. 

t Letter of October 10, 1864, W. R., 1144. 
t Official Records, Vol. XI, pp. i, 12. 



226 ROBERT E. LEE 

from crossing; and the mouth of the Appomattox 
was as securely in the hands of the Union as the 
mouth of the Delaware. 

Grant's plan to seize Petersburg with its 
slender garrison of less than 2,500 men was, 
however, foiled by Beauregard, to whom on his 
urgent request Lee sent men from the north 
side of the James, and though Grant was en- 
abled to seize on June 15th "the formidable 
works to the north-east of the town," when he 
attacked in force on three successive days he 
was repulsed with the loss of 10,000 men, losses 
which shook and disheartened his army even 
more, possibly, than the slaughter at Cold 
Harbor. 

The demoralization consequent on Lee's 
victories from the Wilderness to Petersburg, 
over "the crippled Army of the Potomac," which 
now enabled him to detach Early and, with a 
view to repeating the strategy of 1862, send him 
to the Valley of Virginia, followed by that gen- 
eral's signal success, in conjunction with Breck- 
inridge, in clearing the valley of Sigel and 
Hunter, and, after defeating Wallace at Monoc- 
acy Bridge, in immediately threatening Wash- 
ington itself, sent gold up to 285, the highest 
point it reached during the war.* 

*Rhodes's "History of the United States," IV, p. 509. 



LEE AND GRANT 227 

The authorities in Washington, more alarmed 
even than when Lee was at Sharpsburg or at 
Chambersburg, were clamoring for Grant to 
come and assume personal command of the 
forces protecting the city. And it is charged 
that Grant escaped the fate of his predecessors 
only because there was no one else to put in his 
place. It was even charged that he had fallen 
"back into his old habits of intemperance," a 
charge which Mr. Lincoln dryly dismissed with 
a witticism.* 

Congress, by resolution, requested the Presi- 
dent "to appoint a day for humiliation and 
prayer," and the President, "cordially concurring 
. . . in the pious sentiments expressed" in this 
resolution, appointed the first Thursday in Au- 
gust as a day of national humiliation and prayer 

The simple truth is that, against great out- 
side clamor. Grant was sustained by the au- 
thorities in Washington because he was mani- 

* "Despondency and discouragement," says Rhodes, the latest 
and among the most thoughtful of all the Northern historians of 
the war, ' are words which portray the state of feeling at the North 
during the month of July, and the closer one's knowledge of affairs, 
the gloomier was his view; but the salient facts put into every 
one's mind the pertinent question, ' Who shall revive the withered 
hopes that bloomed on the opening of Grant's campaign?'" 
This question he quotes from the New York World, a paper which 
he states was not unfriendly to Grant. " History of the United 
States," IV, p. 507. 



228 ROBERT E. LEE 

festly the best general in sight, and not because 
he had proved himself the equal of Lee. 

So great was the feeling of despondency at 
the North at this time that several serious, if 
somewhat informal, embassies were sent by the 
authorities at Washington to ascertain the feel- 
ing of the Confederate authorities touching 
peace on the basis of a restoration of the Union, 
coupled at first with a condition of "an abandon- 
ment of slavery," but later without even this 
condition. 

On the very day that Mr. Davis, yielding to 
clamor at the South against the Fabian poHcy 
of the cautious Johnston, who had been falHng 
back before Sherman, relieved that veteran of- 
ficer of his command, he accorded an interview 
to two gentlemen, who had come on an irregular 
mission, with the knowledge and consent of Mr. 
Lincoln, to ask whether any measure could be 
tried that might lead to peace. Mr. Davis re- 
jected the proposal to make peace, unless with 
it came the acknowledgment of the right of the 
South to self-government; "and," declares the 
historian above quoted, "taking into account the 
actual military situation, a different attitude on 
the part of the Richmond Government could not 
have been expected."* 

*Rhodes's "History of the United States," IV, pp. 514-516. 



LEE AND GRANT 229 

In truth, it was not until long afterward, 
and after it was found that the resources of the 
South were exhausted, that Grant's costly policy 
of attrition was accepted by the Government or 
the people, and his star which had been waning 
once more ascended. That it ever ascended 
again was due in part to his constancy of pur- 
pose, and for the rest, to successes elsewhere and 
to the exhaustion of the South: particularly to 
the destruction of the means of communication. 

Viewed in the cold light of the inexorable 
facts, the honors at this time were all with the 
Confederate general, and later comparisons 
so fulsome to Grant and so invidious to Lee 
have all been made in the light of subsequent 
events, over which neither Grant nor Lee ex- 
ercised control. 

Early failed to seize the golden moment which 
presented itself on July nth and take Wash- 
ington, if indeed, it was ever possible to take it. 
On July 17th, the day Sherman crossed the 
Chattahoochee and began his direct march 
on Atlanta, Johnston was reHeved from the 
command of the Southern Army, in obedience 
to popular clamor, at the moment when, if his 
strategy had not prepared the way for the pos- 
sible destruction of the invading force, the vet- 
eran general was, at least, preparing to carry 



230 ROBERT E. LEE 

out the consistent plan he had laid down from 
the beginning. His army was placed under the 
command of the daring but rash Hood, who, 
reversing Johnston's plan, and assuming the of- 
fensive, was speedily defeated, thus leaving Sher- 
man free to devastate the South and close the 
last Southern port through which outside sup- 
plies could be secured. 

No step could have given more aid and com- 
fort to the North, or have been more disastrous 
to the South, than the removal of Johnston. 
Abroad it satisfied the anxious nations of Eu- 
rope that the South was at her last gasp and 
established their hitherto vacillating policy in 
favor of the Union cause, and the Southern 
cause thereafter steadily decHned to its end. 

The same day that the President of the Con- 
federate States removed Joseph E. Johnston, 
the President of the United States, appalled 
at the effect of Lee's masterly defence of Rich- 
mond, issued a proclamation calling for 500,000 
men, and before Grant learned of this call he 
wrote urging a draft of 300,000 immediately.* 

Meantime, Europe had changed front. The 
skilful diplomacy of Charles Francis Adams 
had prevented the delivery to the Confederacy of 
the rams which had been built for her; the sym- 

*Rhodes's "History of the United States," IV, pp. 506-507. 



LEE AND GRANT 231 

pathies of the European nations had changed, 
and the South was, as has been well said by 
the son and namesake of the able diplomat re- 
ferred to, as securely shut up to perish as if she 
had been in a vast vacuum. The victories of 
diplomacy are little considered beside those of 
the battlefield. But, taking into consideration 
what the Merrimac had accomplished during 
her brief but formidable cruise in Hampton 
Roads, where she sank the Cumherlandy capt- 
ured the Congresses crew and drove the famous 
Monitor into shoal water, it is probable that the 
blockade of the Southern ports might have been 
broken had not Mr. Adams's unremitting efforts 
availed to prevent the Confederate rams being 
delivered. 

As it was, the end was clearly in view to Lee. 
The destruction of Hood's army at Nashville 
removed the only force capable of blocking the 
way of Sherman across the South, and left him 
free to march to the sea, and, having got in touch 
with the fleet there, continue through the Caro- 
linas, marking his way with a track of devasta- 
tion which has been likened to that made when 
Saxe carried fire and sword through the Pala- 
tinate. 

Lee, with "Richmond hung like a millstone 
about his neck," a figure he is said to have em- 



232 ROBERT E. LEE 

ployed, was forced to guard a line extending 
from the south of Petersburg to the north of 
Richmond, and to withstand with his thinning 
ranks his able antagonist with an ever-growing 
army and an ever-increasing confidence. 

All that winter Lee lay in the trenches, while 
his army withered and perished from want and 
cold, and while Sherman, almost unopposed, 
burnt, in sheer riot of destruction, suppHes that 
might, had they been available, have subsisted 
that army for ten years, and yet by the pohcy 
of the Confederate Government were left un- 
protected. 

By the end of the year all available resources 
were exhausted. 

On the nth of January, 1865, Lee sent this 
dispatch to the Secretary of War: "Hon. J. A. 
Seddon, there is nothing within reach of this 
army to be impressed. The country is swept 
clear. Our only reliance is upon the railroads. 
We have but two days' supplies." 

R. E. Lee. 

A few weeks later he telegraphed again to 
the Secretary of War, under date of February 
8, 1865. 

Sir: 

All the disposable force of the right wing of 
the army has been operating against the enemy 



LEE AND GRANT 233 

beyond Hatcher's Run since Sunday. Yester- 
day, the most inclement day of the winter, they 
had to be retained in Hne of battle, having been 
in the same condition the two previous days 
and nights. I regret to be obliged to state that 
under these circumstances, heightened by as- 
saults and fire of the enemy, some of the men 
had been without meat for three days, and all 
were suffering from reduced rations and scant 
clothing, exposed to battle, cold, hail and sleet. I 
have directed Colonel Coler, Chief Commissary, 
who reports that he has not a pound of meat at 
his disposal, to visit Richmond and see if noth- 
ing can be done. If some change is not made 
and the Commissary Department reorganized, 
I apprehend dire results. The physical strength 
of the men, if their courage survives, must fail 
under such treatment. Our cavalry has to be 
dispersed for want of forage. Fitz Lee's and 
Lomax's divisions are scattered because sup- 
plies cannot be transported where their services 
are required. I had to bring Wm. H. F. Lee's 
division forty miles Sunday night to get him in 
position. Taking these facts in connection with 
the paucity of our numbers you must not be 
surprised if calamity befalls us. . . . 

R. E. Lee, 

General. 



234 ROBERT E. LEE 

President Davis endorsed on this report: 
"This is too sad to be patiently considered and 
cannot have occurred without criminal neglect 
or gross incapacity. ..." A comment, as true 
to-day as when Lee set before him plainly the 
tragic fact that his army was fast perishing at 
its post. 

Unfortunately for the South, the rest of the 
President's endorsement, "Let supplies be had 
by purchase or borrowing or other possible 
mode," was inefficacious. There was no longer 
any possible mode by which supplies could be 
had. The South was exhausted, because Vir- 
ginia had been swept clean and there were no 
means of transporting supplies from elsewhere. 

The following day General Lee assumed the 
office of Commander-in-Chief of the military 
forces of the Confederate States to which he 
had been appointed on the 6th; but it was too 
late. He had already carried the fortunes of 
the Confederacy on his shoulders for, at least, 
two years longer than the Confederacy could 
have survived without his genius to sustain it; 
and now the time had come when no mortal 
power could longer support it. Its end had 
come. All had gone except the indomitable 
and immortal spirit of its people. 

Grant's sagacious disposition of his forces, 



LEE AND GRANT 235 

together with his command of the Chesapeake 
and its great tributaries, enabled him to threaten 
at pleasure either of the two cities. With his 
pontoon bridge across the James, protected by 
his gunboats and veiled by his heavy entrench- 
ments, he could at any time mass a sufficient 
number of troops on the north side of that river 
to cause grave anxiety and compel Lee to 
transfer a sufficient force from before Peters- 
i burg to withstand him. And, at the same time, 
he could still retain on the Appomattox a force 
superior to Lee's, prepared to assault Lee's 
depleted lines whenever a chance presented 
itself. 

Yet, for nearly ten months after Grant's first 
attempt on Petersburg, Lee held him at bay. And 
even at the last he succumbed not so much to the 
attacks in his front, as to the failure of the Con- 
federate Government to supply his troops with 
the necessaries of life — a failure, in its turn, due 
to the perishing or the destruction of all means 
of transportation. His reports to the President 
of the Confederate States during the winter set 
forth plainly the impossibility of maintaining 
his position unless subsistence should be fur- 
nished his troops. But subsistence could not 
be, or, at least, was not, furnished, and while the 
sword attacked in front, hunger assailed in the 



236 ROBERT E. LEE 

rear. His men had, he wrote the War Depart- 
ment in February, endured all that flesh and 
blood could endure. In the battle-line suffer- 
ing from cold and exhaustion, they had not had 
meat for three days. No wonder that his 
numbers dwindled and that his tardy elevation, 
in February, to the position of Commander-in- 
Chief was futile to recoup the destruction. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 

AS a sequel to these far-reaching conditions, 
^ the poHcy of attrition simply went on from 
month to month, until on the fatal 2d of April, 
Lee, who had only a few weeks before been 
made Commander-in-Chief, and almost whose 
first act had been the reinstatement of John- 
ston in his command, following an extension of 
Grant's lines around his flank, which broke 
his connection with the South and threatened 
to envelop him, announced to his Government 
that he could no longer maintain the long line 
from south of Petersburg to north of Richmond. 
On the 29th of March, as he was preparing to 
evacuate Petersburg and start south to unite 
with Johnston and attack Sherman, Grant, who 
was apprehensive of such a movement, began 
to move around his right to foil it. To prevent 
this, Lee was forced to withdraw troops from 
other parts of his line, and Grant promptly 
proceeded to take advantage of this fact. 

On the 1st of April, following a repulse on 
237 



238 ROBERT E. LEE 

the evening before in front of Lee's extreme 
right, Sheridan attacked and defeated at Five 
Forks Pickett, who had left a long gap of several 
miles defended only by pickets between his 
troops and the nearest line. And Grant, having 
carried Lee's outer defences, ordered a general 
assault for the next day. Lee, knowing the 
wasted condition of his army and the impossi- 
bihty of holding against Grant's contemplated 
assault his long-stretched line, decided to exe- 
cute at once, if possible, his plan to abandon 
the lines he had held for nearly ten months and 
move southward to effect a junction with John- 
ston. He notified the Government in Rich- 
mond, arranged for provisions to meet him at 
Ameha Court House, and that night executed 
with consummate skill the difficult feat of extri- 
cating his reduced army from its perilous position 
and started on a retreat southward. 

His letters show his entire appreciation of the 
difficulty and peril of his situation; but there is 
not a trace of dismay in all his writing. Never 
more than now, when he made his last move in 
the great game of war, did the mens equa in ar- 
duis, that mark of noble minds, which ever dis- 
distinguished him, shine forth in him. 

His letter to his wife, on the eve of the move- 
ment which was to prove the closing act in the 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 239 

great drama of the war, reflects his serenity 
amid the rising difficulties which were soon to 
engulf him. He thanks her for the socks she had 
knitted for his barefooted and suffering men; en- 
closes for her a life of General Scott, for whom 
he had a word of old-time affection and esteem, 
and commends her to God. 

That night he executed successfully the diffi- 
cult movement to which he referred and with- 
drew his hungry troops from their long-held 
and historic entrenchments. 

Some historians, who under the natural im- 
pulse to laud the commanders of the Union 
armies yet have instinctively felt that on the 
plain face of the records Lee had the honors as 
a soldier, have undertaken to assert that "the 
conditions were not unequal: that Lee might 
have withdrawn his army and effected a junction 
with Johnston, but was outgeneraled by Grant." 
To support this claim they assign to Lee the 
highest number of men that by any computation 
could possibly be assigned to him and take no 
account of the absent and the disabled. 

The latest of these historians, and among 
the most broad-minded of the class, has as- 
signed to Lee at the beginning of his retreat 
49,000 men, against Grant's 113,000, and de- 
clares that with "the game escape or surrender 



240 ROBERT E. LEE 

the conditions were not unequal, and Lee was 
simply outgeneraled." * 

Conditions not unequal! When Grant, as 
commander of all the Northern armies, had 
nearly one miUion men under his command, 
and Lee, as commander of the Southern armies, 
had less than two hundred thousand under his 
command; and when Grant had a great navy 
to support and transport subsistence for his ar- 
mies, and Lee had no navy and no means of trans- 
portation. If Lee was simply outgeneraled some 
change must have taken place in the two men, 
since, with an army never more than ten thou- 
sand in excess of the numbers assigned him 
here,t Lee fought through the month of May, 
1864, Grant^s army of 140,000, defeated him in 
battle after battle from the Wilderness to Peters- 
burg, caused him losses of 124,000 men, and 
must have destroyed him but for his inexhaust- 
ible resources of men and munition. 

But, by the records, the statement quoted is 
erroneous, and, laying aside the imperfect records 
of the Confederate Army, the evidence is beyond 
question that when Lee began his retreat he had 
only about half of the number of men assigned 

* Rhodes's " History," Vol. V. 

t In fact, the 49,000 was before the great losses at the end of 
February. 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 241 

to him by these historians. Colonel Walter 
H. Taylor, of his staff, estimates that Lee had on 
March 31st 33,000 muskets, and General Lee 
told General Fitz Lee that he had at that time 
35,000 men; "but after Five Forks and in the 
encounters of March 31st, April ist and 2d, he 
had only 20,000 muskets available, and of all 
arms not over 25,000, when he began the retreat 
that terminated at Appomattox Court House.'** 

Whatever may be the numbers shown on 
records scatteringly made, and, at best, most im- 
perfect, Lee's statement for those who know him 
settles the question. 

But even these men were little more than 
spectres. Ill-fed, ill-clad, kept for ten months 
on a constant strain in the face of an army that 
might at any time mass treble their number on 
either flank; stretched in a line thirty-five miles 
in length, every point of which it was vital to 
hold; wasted by hunger, disease and cold, these 
veterans made no plea of being outnumbered. 
Under Lee they answered every demand and 
held Grant at bay until not only subsistence, 
but hope of subsistence, perished. 

Then, as Grant, on the opening of spring, 
moved to overwhelm them and threatened Lee's 
line, Lee led them out, as he had already planned 

♦Fitzhugh Lee's " Life of Lee," p. 373. 



242 ROBERT E. LEE 

to do should necessity arise and his Government 
permit. It was a delicate and perilous move- 
ment, and one that would have taxed the powers 
of the greatest general in history. For Grant, 
with his overwhelming army stretching south 
of him, lay close against him in a line thirty odd 
miles long which at many points was not a 
musket-shot away. 

Lee having given Longstreet, who protected 
Richmond on the north, orders to cross and join 
him at a given point on the night of the 2d of 
April, withdrew his men from their trenches, 
crossed to the north of the Appomattox on the 
south bank of which rested Grant's left, and, 
marching up the north bank, recrossed to the 
south side beyond Grant's lines and directed his 
course for Amelia Court House, to which point 
he had ordered provisions to be sent to meet him. 
Had his orders been obeyed, it is the opinion of 
many competent critics that he might have 
eluded Grant's pursuit, prompt and efficient as 
it was. But no provisions were there. Some one 
had blundered. It appears that a provision-train 
had arrived on April ist, but had been fatuously 
ordered to Richmond. However it was, a day 
was lost in the effort to obtain subsistence from 
the depleted countryside for his famished army, 
men and horses, and in the interval Grant was 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 243 

enabled to come up, and thenceforth, In the Hght 
of subsequent events, further retreat was un- 
avaihng. From this moment it was merely a 
question of whether the endurance of his starv- 
ing force would hold out to march and fight 
until he had outstripped Grant with his pre- 
ponderant force possessed of ample subsistence 
and baggage trains. So great was the confi- 
dence of his men in Lee that many of them be- 
lieved that the retreat was a movement designed 
by him to draw Grant from his base of supplies 
with a view to turning on him and destroying 
him. 

Every step was in face of the enemy massing 
in force under the able direction of men Hke 
Meade, Ord and Sheridan. The fighting was 
almost hourly, and, while fortune varied, the 
balance of success was largely with the pursuing 
forces. At Sailor's Creek, EwelFs command 
was cut off and overwhelmed, as was Anderson's, 
with a loss together of nearly 6,000 men. Among 
the prisoners were six generals, Ewell, Custis 
Lee, Kershaw, Dubose, Corse and Hunton. 

At Farmville, reached on the 6th, provisions 
were found and the men were served with ra- 
tions for the first time since they left Petersburg; 
but for the most part they lived on such scanty 
fare as they could secure from the already 



244 ROBERT E. LEE 

well-swept region which they passed. So de- 
nuded was the country of all that would sustain 
life, that men thought themselves well off when 
a corn-house was found with grain yet left in it 
and corn was distributed to them to be parched. 
Even this was not always to be had, and as corn 
was necessary for the artillery horses, guards 
were posted where they fed to prevent the men 
from taking it from the horses. They were re- 
duced to the necessity of raking up the scattered 
grains from the ground where the horses had 
been fed and even to picking the grains from 
the droppings of the horses. Many of the 
men became too weak to carry their muskets. 
Small wonder that they dropped out of the 
ranks by hundreds. Yet still the remainder 
kept on, with unwavering courage, unwavering 
devotion and unwavering faith in their com- 
mander, and wherever a chance was presented 
they gave a good account of themselves. 

In their rags and tatters, ill-clad, ill-shod, ill- 
fed, ill-armed, and, whenever armed, armed for 
the most part with the weapons they had capt- 
ured from brave foes on hard-fought battle- 
fields, they were the abiding expression of 
Southern valor and fortitude; the flower of 
Southern manhood; the pick of every class; the 
crystallized residue of the Army of Northern 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 245 

Virginia, with which Lee had achieved his fame 
and on which to future ages shall rest the fame 
of the South. 

Like a wounded lion that spent and wasted 
army dragged itself across the desolated land; 
now turning at bay and at every turn leaving its 
deep" mark on its pursuers, now retreating again 
without haste or fear, and simply in obedience 
to the instinct of self-preservation, and at the 
last, sinking with exhaustion, with crest unlow- 
ered, heart undaunted and face steadfastly set 
to the foe. 

The spring rains had made the roads so deep 
in that region of deep roads as to be well- 
nigh impassable to the well-equipped troops of 
Grant, and operations, just before the evacu- 
ation of Richmond, had once to be suspended. 
To Lee's ill-fed teams they became at times 
actually impassable and batteries had to be 
abandoned because the exhausted horses could 
not longer pull the guns. In some cases the ar- 
tillery-men armed themselves with muskets 
picked up on the march and were formed into 
infantry companies. But in face of Grant's cap- 
ital generalship, using his great army to best ad- 
vantage, attacking and capturing bodies of 
troops day after day, the end could no longer be 
doubtful. On the 7th, General Pendleton, 



246 ROBERT E. LEE 

chief of Lee's reserve artillery, at the request of 
some of the high officers, approached the com- 
mander with the suggestion that their united 
voice v^as that the situation was hopeless, and 
that further fighting was useless. Lee, how- 
ever, was more far-sighted. He had not yet 
abandoned hope and he replied that he had too 
many brave men to think of laying down his 
arms, and that they still fought with great spirit. 
Furthermore, if he should first intimate to Grant 
that he would listen to terms an unconditional 
surrender might be demanded. "And sooner 
than that," he added, "I am resolved to die."* 

The end justified his determination. Grant, 
approaching in his pursuit the limit of what he 
thought a safe distance to place between his 
army and his base, the following day opened 
negotiations with Lee for the surrender of his 
army. 

Long before, in writing to one of his brothers 
from Mexico where he contributed so much to 
the brilliant victories which ended in the capture 
of the Mexican capital, Lee had said, "We have 
the right, by the laws of war, of dictating the 
terms of peace and requiring indemnity for our 
losses and expenses. Rather than forego that 
right except, through a spirit of magnanimity for 

* Fitzhugh Lee's " Life of Lee," p. 392. 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 247 

a crushed foe, I would fight them ten years; but 
I would be generous in exercising it." * 

Would it not be likely that this letter should 
recur to him in this crisis of his life ? 

In another letter he says, in referring to the 
terms of peace: "These are certainly not hard 
terms for Mexico, considering how the fortune 
of war has been against her. For myself, I 
would not exact more than I would have taken 
before the commencement of hostilities, as I 
should wish nothing but what was just.^f 

The continuous fighting held Lee back, and 
enabled Sheridan, followed by Ord, marching 
by a parallel route, to reach Appomattox Sta- 
tion before him and bar his further progress. 

A proposal was made to Lee that the army 
should scatter and make its way to Johnston by 
various routes. This plan Lee promptly dis- 
posed of. He declared that he would go to 
General Grant and surrender himself, though 
he went alone, and take the consequences of his 
acts.J 

On the 8th of April orders were issued for 

* Letter to his brother, Sydney Smith Lee, March 4, 1848, 
cited in Jones's "Life and Letters of Lee," p. 57. 

t (Letter cited in Jones's "Lee," p. 54.) John Russell Young 
once told the writer that Grant stated to him that he could not 
have kept up his pursuit a half day longer. 

t" Military Memoirs of General E. P, Alexander," p. 605. 



248 ROBERT E. LEE 

a last eflPort. The artillery was directed to be 
brought up during the night and massed with a 
view to breaking through Grant's forming Unes, 
and steps were taken to deliver battle once more. . 
All night the men toiled, but next morning the 
officer charged with the task* notified Gordon 
that his utmost efforts had been able to bring up 
only two batteries — the rest of the artillery had 
taken another route and could not be reached 
— the horses of the other batteries available 
were gone; the residue of that artillery which 
had once helped to make the artillery duels of 
Lee and Grant the fiercest in the records of war 
was silenced forever. 

On this small fragment of his once redoubt- 
able artillery, and on the remnant of his infantry 
and cavalry, one more call was made by Lee. 
As the sun rose on the morning of the 9th of 
April, the worn and wasted squadrons, with a 
response as prompt and generous as in the best 
days of his most victorious campaigns, advanced 
to their last charge to drive for the last time their 
foes before them. The first onset was success- 
ful. Sheridan's cavalry was driven back in 
confusion and the situation was possibly saved 
only, as the supporting general himself stated, 

* Colonel Thomas H. Carter, a gallant and eflficient soldier, and 
Lee's near kinsman. 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 249 

by the timely arrival of Ord, the commander of 
the Army of the James, with abundant troops 
to bar the way.* 

Lee, after his surrender, asked for 25,000 ra- 
tions, and this is accepted as the number of his 
army. But the actual number of muskets sur- 
rendered on the 9th of April was less than 9,000. 
Lee had fought his army until it had simply 
worn away. 

Whatever men Lee had on his rolls, whether 
ten thousand, twenty-five thousand or forty 
thousand, they were in their famished and spent 
condition too few to defeat Grant's ably led 
force, whether that force were 100,000 or 180,000, 
and Lee, acting in accord with the views of his 
general officers who had urged on him this 
course, at last decided to avail himself of Grant's 
generous proposal. He asked and received 
from him honorable terms for the surrender of 
whatever remained of the Army of Northern 
Virginia. A detached portion of the cavalry 
had broken through and started to make its 
way to Johnston, but Lee recalled the officer 
in command and informed him that he was in- 
cluded in his surrender. 

* " Ord left Petersburg with 20,000 troops, all arms; Fifth Corps, 
15,973 (Report of March 31, 1865); Sheridan's Cavalry, 13,810; 
to which add 1,000 for the Fifth Corps Artillery, makes 50,783." 
— Fitzhugh Lee's " Life of Lee," p. 388, note. 



250 ROBERT E. LEE 

The greatness of the occasion appears to 
have Hfted Grant to a higher plane than that of 
the mere soldier from which he had looked ap- 
parently unmoved on the sacrifice of thousands 
of the gallant men and officers who, from the 
Wilderness to Cold Harbor, had died at his bid- 
ding; and from which he had refused with cold 
calculation the offers of the South to exchange 
prisoners and had left men to die like sheep in 
prisons made noisome largely by their numbers. 

In the long vigils before Petersburg, faced 
by a brave and steadfast foe, his mind had ap- 
parently been elevated as it mainly became in 
the presence of a great crisis — as it became years 
afterward when, clutched fast in the grip of 
his last and conquering foe, he held death at 
bay while he completed the remarkable work 
on which his family were to depend for their 
support. However this was, his generosity justi- 
fied Lee's declaration that he would give his 
army as good terms as it had a right to expect, 
and his correspondence with Lee will bear com- 
parison with that of any victor in history.* 

* An incident of the surrender told by Grant to Dr. Fordyce 
Barker was related by him to Dr. Wm. M. Polk. Dr. Barker 
asked Grant how he felt when he met Lee at Appomattox. Was 
he not sensible of great elation over his achievement ? 

Grant replied that on the contrary he was sensible rather of hu- 
miliation. When he found Lee in full-dress uniform while he 



THE RETREAT TO APPOMATTOX 251 

Ten days after Lee's surrender, Sherman, 
moved thereto by a more generous impulse than 
had hitherto appeared to inspire him, and plainly 
influenced by Grant's magnanimity, off^ered to 
Johnston terms even more generous, if possible, 
than Grant had proposed to Lee, and after a 
brief period of negotiation in which Sherman's 
far-sighted views were scornfully disavowed and 
rejected by the authorities in Washington, just 
unbridled by the tragic death of Lincoln, John- 
ston surrendered on the same terms that Lee 
had accepted. 

In this convention all the remaining forces 
of the South were included, and, in so far as the 
South could effect it, the war was over. The 

himself was in a simple fatigue-suit : a private's blouse with only 
a general's shoulder-straps to denote his rank, and with his boots 
spattered to their tops, he was afraid that Lee might imagine that 
he intended a discourtesy to him because of an incident that had 
occurred in Mexico. General Scott, he said, was exceedingly par- 
ticular as to all matters of etiquette, and had given orders that 
no officer should appear at head-quarters without being in full- 
dress. On some occasion thereafter Grant had gone to head-quar- 
ters in an ordinary fatigue-uniform and that not as neat, perhaps, as 
it should have been, and had reported to Lee, who was at the time 
serving on Scott's staff. After the business had been transacted, 
Lee said, " I feel it my duty. Captain, to call your attention to 
General Scott's order that an officer reporting at head-quarters 
should be in full uniform." 

This incident, said the general, suddenly flashed across his 
mind and made him uncomfortable lest General Lee should recall 
it also, and imagine that he intended to affront him. 



252 ROBERT E. LEE 

war, however, practically ended when Lee sur- 
rendered his army at Appomattox. 

The highest tribute to this army is the simple 
fact that with its surrender the war was over. 
The fortunes of the Confederacy had been nailed 
to its tattered standards and with them went 
down. 



CHAPTER XV 

LEE IN DEFEAT 

A ND now, having adverted thus hastily to 
those glorious campaigns which must, to the 
future student of military skill, place Lee among 
the first captains of history, I shall not invite 
attention further to Lee the soldier — not to Lee 
the victorious general of the Seven Days' fights; 
of Second Manassas; of Fredericksburg; of 
Chancellorsville; of the Wilderness; ofSpottsyl- 
vania Court House; of Cold Harbor — not to 
Lee the Strategist, who reHeved Richmond in 
three campaigns. Not to Lee the Victorious, 
shall I ask further attention; but to a greater 
Lee — to Lee the Defeated. 

As glorious as were these campaigns, it is on 
the last act of the drama, the retreat from Peters- 
burg, the surrender at Appomattox and the dark 
period that followed that surrender, that we 
must look to see him at his best. His every 
act, his every word, showed how completely 
he had surrendered himself to Duty; and with 
253 



254 ROBERT E. LEE 

what implicit obedience he followed the com- 
mand of that 

" Stern daughter of the voice of God." 

"Are you sanguine of the result of the war ?" 
asked Bishop Wilmer of him in the closing days 
of the struggle. His reply was: 

"At present I am not concerned with results. 
God's will ought to be our aim, and I am quite 
contented that His designs should be accom- 
plished and not mine." 

On that last morning when his handful of 
worn and starving veterans had made their last 
charge, to find themselves shut in by ranks of 
serried steel; hemmed in by Grant's entire 
army; he faced the decree of Fate with as much 
constancy as though that decree were Success, 
not Doom. 

"What will history say of the surrender of 
an army in the field ? " asked an officer of his staff 
in passionate grief. 

"Yes, I know they will say hard things of 
us; they will not understand that we were over- 
whelmed by numbers; but that is not the ques- 
tion. Colonel. The question is, is it right to 
surrender this army ? If it is right, then I will 
take all of the responsibility." 

It was ever the note of duty that he sounded. 



LEE IN DEFEAT 255 

"You will take with you," he said to his 
army in his farewell address, "the satisfaction 
that proceeds from the consciousness of duty 
faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that 
a merciful God will extend to you His blessing 
and protection. With an unceasing admiration 
of your constancy and devotion to your country 
and a grateful remembrance of your kind and 
generous consideration of myself, I bid you an 
affectionate farewell." 

"We are conscious that we have humbly tried 
to do our duty," he said, a year or more after the 
war, when the clouds hung heavy over the 
South; "we may, therefore, with calm satisfac- 
tion trust in God and leave results to Him." 

The sun, which has shone in the morning, 
but has become obscured by clouds in the after- 
noon, sometimes breaks forth, and at its setting 
shines with a greater splendor than it knew even 
at high noon. 

So here. Sheathing his stainless sword, sur- 
rendering in the field the remnant of an army 
that had once been the most redoubtable body 
of fighting men of the century, the greatest cap- 
tain, the noblest gentleman of our time, expect- 
ing to slip into the darkness of oblivion, suddenly 
stepped forth from the gloom of defeat into the 
splendor of perpetual fame. 



256 ROBERT E. LEE 

I love to think of Grant as he appeared that 
April day at the surrender: the simple soldier, 
the strenuous fighter, who, though thrashed, 
was always ready to fight again; who, now 
though he had achieved the prize for which he 
had fought so hard and had paid so dearly, was 
so modest, and so unassuming, that but for his 
shoulder-straps and that yet better mark of 
rank, his generosity, he might not have been 
known as the victor. Southerners generally 
have long forgiven Grant all else for the mag- 
nanimity that he showed that day to Lee. By 
his orders no salutes of joy were fired, no public 
marks of exultation over his fallen foe were 
allowed. History contains no finer example of 
greatness. Not Alexander in his generous 
youth excelled him. 

Yet, it is not more to the victor that posterity 
will turn her gaze than to the vanquished, her 
admiration at the glory of the conqueror well- 
nigh lost in amazement at the dignity of the 
conquered. 

Men who saw the defeated general when he 
came forth from the chamber where he had 
signed the articles of capitulation say that he 
paused a moment as his eyes rested once more 
on the Virginia hills; smote his hands together 
as though in some excess of inward agony, then 



LEE IN DEFEAT 257 

mounted his gray horse, Traveller, and rode 
calmly away. 

If that was the very Gethsemane of his trials, 
yet he must have had then one moment of su- 
preme, if chastened, joy. As he rode quietly 
down the lane leading from the scene of capitu- 
lation, he passed into view of his men — of such 
as remained of them. The news of the sur- 
render had got abroad and they were waiting, 
grief-stricken and dejected upon the hillsides, 
when they caught sight of their old commander 
on the gray horse. Then occurred one of the 
most notable scenes in the history of war. In 
an instant they were about him, bare-headed, 
with tear-wet faces; thronging him, kissing his 
hand, his boots, his saddle; weeping; cheering 
him amid their tears; shouting his name to the 
very skies. He said, ''Men, we have fought 
through the war together; I have done my best 
for you; my heart is too full to say more." 

Thus, with kindly words, as of a father, and a 
heart that must have felt some solace in such de- 
votion, he bade them farewell, and left them like 
the devoted band that wept for the great Apostle 
to the Gentiles, weeping most of all that they 
should see his face no more. 

The cheers were heard afar off over the hills 
where the victorious army lay encamped, and 



258 ROBERT E. LEE 

awakened some anxiety. It was a sound they 
well knew: 

''The voice once heard through Shiloh's woods, 
And Chickamauga's sohtudes, 
The fierce South cheering on her sons." 

It was reported in some of the Northern papers 
that it was the sound of jubilation at the sur- 
render. But no! Some of those who are still 
here know what it was; for they were there. 
It was the voice of jubilation, yet not for surren- 
der: but for the captain who had surrendered 
their muskets, but was still the commander of 
their hearts. 

This is Lee's final victory and the highest 
tribute to the South: that the devotion of the 
South to him was greater in the hour of defeat 
than in that of victory. It is said that Na- 
poleon was adored by the men of France; but 
hated by the women. It was not so with Lee. 
No victor ever came home to receive more signal 
evidences of devotion than this defeated general. 

Richmond was in mourning. Since the 
Union army had entered her gates, every house 
had been closed as though it were the house of 
death. One afternoon, a few days after the 
surrender, Lee, on his gray horse, Traveller, 
attended by two or three officers, crossed the 



LEE IN DEFEAT 259 

James and rode quietly up the street to his 
home on FrankUn Street, where he dismounted. 
That evening it was noised abroad that General 
Lee had arrived; he had been seen to enter his 
house. Next morning the houses were open as 
usual; life began to flow in its accustomed chan- 
nels. Those who were there have said that 
when General Lee returned they felt as safe as 
if he had had his whole army at his back. 

His first recorded words on his arrival were 
a tribute to his successful opponent. "General 
Grant has acted with magnanimity," he said 
to some who spoke of the victor with bitterness. 
It was the keynote to his after life. 

Over forty years have gone by since that day 
in April when Lee, to avoid further useless 
sacrifice of life, surrendered himself and all 
that 'remained of the Army of Northern Virginia 
and gave his parole d'honneur to bear arms no 
more against the United States. To him, who 
with prescient mind had long borne in his bosom 
knowledge of the exhausted resources of the 
Confederacy, and had seen his redoubtable 
army, under the "policy of attrition," dwindle 
away to a mere ghost of its former self, it might 
well appear that he had failed, and, if he ever 
thought of his personal reputation, that he had 
lost the soldier's dearest prize; that Fame had 



26o ROBERT E. LEE 

turned her back and Fate usurped her place. 
Thenceforth, he who had been the leader of 
armies; whose glorious achievements had filled 
the world; who had been the prop of a high- 
hearted nation's hope, was to walk the narrow 
byway of private life, defeated, impoverished 
and possibly misunderstood. 

But to us who have survived for the space of 
more than a generation, how different it ap- 
pears. We know that Time, the redresser of 
wrongs, is steadily righting the act of unkind 
Fate; and Fame, firmly established in her high 
seat, is ever placing a richer laurel on his brow. 

Yea, ride away, thou defeated general! Ride 
through the broken fragments of thy shattered 
army, ride through thy war-wasted land, amid 
thy desolate and stricken people. But know 
that thou art riding on Fame's highest way: 

"This day shall see 
Thy head wear sunlight and thy feet touch stars." 



CHAPTER XVI 

AFTER THE WAR 

^T^HE Sternest test of Lee's character was yet 
to come. Only those who went through it 
can know the depth of the humihation in which, 
during the next few years, mahgnity, with Igno- 
rance for ally, strove to steep the South. 

Out of it Lee came without a trace of rancor 
or of bitterness. In all the annals of our race 
no man has ever shown a nobler or more Chris- 
tian spirit. 

Lincoln, who was of Southern blood and 
whose passion was a reunited Union, was in 
his grave, slain by a madman, and after Hfe's 
fitful fever was sleeping well, his last message 
being one of peace and good-will. His successor 
began by flinging himself into the arms of those 
who had hated Lincoln most. 

On the 29th of May, President Johnson issued 
a proclamation of amnesty, but General Lee, 
with all others of rank, was excluded from its 
operation, and he was indicted for treason, 

261 



262 ROBERT E. LEE 

by a grand jury, composed partly of negroes, 
especially selected for the purpose of returning 
indictments against him and Mr. Davis. There 
were those who stood proudly aloof and gave no 
sign of desiring reinstatement as citizens. Some 
scornfully declared their resolution to live and die 
without accepting parole. Not so the broad- 
minded and wise Lee. He immediately wrote (on 
June 1 3th) to the President applying for the "ben- 
efits and full restoration of all rights and privi- 
leges extended to those included in the terms of 
the proclamation." This application he inclosed 
on the same day in a letter to General Grant 
informing him that he was ready to meet any 
charges that might be preferred against him 
and did not wish to avoid trial, but that he had 
supposed that the officers and men of the army 
of Northern Virginia were by the terms of 
surrender protected by the United States Gov- 
ernment from molestation so long as they con- 
formed to its conditions. 

Grant immediately rose to the demand of the 
occasion — as he had a way of doing in great 
emergencies. He inKrued General Lee that 
his understanding of the convention at Appo- 
mattox was identical with his; and he is said to 
have threatened Johnson with the surrender 
of the command of the army unless the indict- 



AFTER THE WAR 263 

ment were quashed and the convention honor- 
ably observed. 

Johnson himself, confronted by an ever- 
strengthening phalanx of enemies v^ithin his own 
party, soon, for his own reasons, underwent a 
change of heart, and from denouncing against 
the South measures that should "make treason 
odious,'' began to speak of the South to South- 
erners in a more conciliatory manner. Gover- 
nor Letcher, of Virginia, who had been arrested, 
was treated in Washington with kindness and 
consideration. It was on learning of this that 
General Lee declared his opinion that the deci- 
sion of war having been against the South, it was 
"the part of wisdom to acquiesce in the result, 
and of candor to recognize the fact.'* The inter- 
ests of the State of Virginia, he said, were the same 
as those of the United States. Its prosperity 
would rise or fall with the welfare of the country. 
The duty of its citizens then appeared to him 
too plain to admit of doubt. He urged that all 
should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the 
effects of war and to restore the blessings of 
peace. That they should remain if possible 
in the country; promote harmony and good 
feeling; qualify themselves to vote and elect 
to the State and general legislatures wise and 
patriotic men who would devote their abilities 



264 ROBERT E. LEE 

to the interests of the country and the healing 
of all dissensions. "I have," he asserted, "in- 
variably recommended this course since the 
cessation of hostilities, and have endeavored 
to practise it myself."* 

He was much disturbed about this time by 
the tendency of some of his old friends in their 
despair to emigrate from the South. That con- 
stant soul knew no defeat, much less despair, 
and he had not despaired of the South. He 
protested against leaving the State for any reason, 
avowing his unalterable belief in the duty of 
every man to remain and bear his part in what- 
ever trials might befall. "The thought of 
abandoning the country and all that must be 
left in it," he wrote, "is abhorrent to my feel- 
ings, and I prefer to struggle for its restoration 
and share its fate rather than to give up all as 
lost, and Virginia has need for all her sons."t 
And this devotion he exemplified to the fullest 
extent in his life. 

The war had scarcely ceased and his con- 
dition of narrow circumstances become known, 
when offers of places of honor and profit began 
to come to him: offers of the presidency of 
insurance companies and of other industrial 

♦Letter of August 28, 1865, to ex-Governor Letcher. 

t Letter to Commodore M. F. Maury, September 8, 1865. 



AFTER THE WAR 265 

enterprises — proposals that he should allow his 
name to be used for the highest office in the gift 
of the State; even offers from admirers in the 
old country of an asylum on that side of the 
water, where a handsome estate was tendered 
him, as a tribute of admiration, so that he 
could spend the residue of his life in peace and 
comfort. 

His reply to all these allurements was that 
which we now know was the only one he could 
make: a gracious but irrevocable refusal. Dur- 
ing the war, when a friend had suggested to 
him the probabihty that the people of the 
South would demand that he should be their 
President, he had promptly and decisively de- 
clared that he would never accept such a posi- 
tion. So now, when the governorship of Vir- 
ginia was proposed to him, he firmly refused to 
consider it. With the same firmness he rejected 
all proposals to provide him with honorable 
commercial positions at a high salary. 

On one of these occasions he was approached 
with a tender of the presidency of an insurance 
company at a salary of ^50,000 a year. He de- 
clined it on the ground that it was work with 
which he was not familiar. "But, General," 
said the gentleman who represented the insur- 
ance company, "you will not be expected to do 



266 ROBERT E. LEE 

any work; what we wish is the use of your 



name." 



"Do you not think," said General Lee, "that 
if my name is worth ^50,000 a year, I ought to 
be very careful about taking care of it ?" 

Amid the commercialism of the present age 
this sounds as refreshing as the oath of a knight 
of the Round Table. 

Defeated in one warfare, he was still a captain 
militant in the service of Duty: Duty, that like 
the moon, often shows her darkened face to 
her votary, though in the future she may beam 
with radiance. 

Duty now appeared to him to send her sum- 
mons from a Httle mountain town in which 
was a classical school which Washington had 
endowed, and Lee, turning from all offers of 
wealth and ease, obeyed her call. 

"They are offering my father everything," 
said one of his daughters, "but the only thing 
he will accept: a place to earn honest bread 
while engaged in some useful work." That 
speech, made to a Trustee of the Institution re- 
ferred to, brought Lee the offer of the presidency 
of Washington College at a salary of ^1,500 a 
year — and after some hesitation, due to his fear 
that his association with an institution might 
in the state of political feeling then existing 



AFTER THE WAR 267 

prove an injury rather than a benefit to it, he 
accepted it. 

Thus, the first captain of his time, and almost, 
if not quite, the most famous man in the world, 
with offers that might well, in that hour of trial, 
have allured even him with all his modesty, 
turned his back on the world, and, following 
the lamp with which Duty appeared to light his 
way, rode quietly to that little mountain town 
in Rockbridge to devote the remainder of his 
Hfe to fitting the sons of his old soldiers to 
meet the exactions of the coming time. On his 
old war-horse, he rode into Lexington alone, 
one afternoon in the early autumn, and, after a 
hush of reverent silence at his first appearance, 
was greeted on the streets by his old soldiers with 
the far-famed rebel yell which he had heard 
last as he rode down the lane from Appomattox. 

Ah! ride on alone, old man, with Duty at thy 
bridle-bit: behind thee is the glory of thy mili- 
tary career; before thee is the transcendent 
fame of thy future. Thou shalt abide there 
henceforth; there shall thy ashes repose; but 
thou shalt make of that little town a shrine to 
which pilgrims shall turn with softened eyes so 
long as men admire virtue and the heart aspires 
to the ideal of Duty. 

He was sworn in as president on the 2d of 



268 ROBERT E. LEE 

October, 1865, and thenceforth his life was de- 
voted to the new service he had entered on, with 
the same zeal with which he always applied him- 
self to the dutv before him. 



CHAPTER XVII 

LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 

'VJO part of his life reflects greater honor on 
his memory than that which was now 
to come. Here, as in everything else, he ad- 
dressed all his powers to the work in hand. 
He found the institution merely an old and de- 
nominational college, dilapidated and well-nigh 
ruined, without means and without students. 
The mere fact of his connection with it gave it 
at once a reputation. He changed the little col- 
lege, as if by an enchanter's wand, from a mere 
academy to a great institution of learning. He 
instituted or extended the honor system — that 
Southern system which reckons the establish- 
ment of character to be at once the basis and 
end of all education. Students flocked there 
from all over the South. He knew them all — 
and, what is more, followed them all in their 
work. He w^as as prompt at chapel as the 
chaplains; as interested in the classes as the 
professors and certainly more than the students. 

"I have led the young men of the South to 

269 



270 ROBERT E. LEE 

battle," he said on one occasion; "I have 
seen many of them die on the field. I shall de- 
vote my remaining energy to training young 
men to do their duty in life." And nobly he 
performed this high task. The standard he 
ever held up was that of duty. 

His old soldiers, often at great sacrifice, sent 
their sons to be under his direction, and to 
learn at his feet the stern lesson of duty. But 
it was he who made the college worthy of their 
confidence. He elevated the standards, broad- 
ened the scope, called about him the most ac- 
complished professors to be found and inspired 
them with new enthusiasm. No principle was 
too abstruse for him to grasp; no detail too 
small for him to examine. He famiHarized 
himself alike with the methods employed at the 
best institutions, and with the conduct and 
standing of every student at his own. 

An educational ofllicial has stated that of a 
number of college presidents to whom he ad- 
dressed an inquiry relating to educational 
matters. General Lee was the only one who 
took the trouble to send him an answer. He 
who had commanded armies, "the lowliest 
duties on himself did lay." He audited every 
account; he presided at every faculty meeting; 
studied and signed every report. 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 271 

In fact, the chief stimulus to the students 
was the knowledge that General Lee was fa- 
miliar with every student's standing, and to 
some extent, with every man's conduct. An 
invitation to visit him in his office was the most 
dreaded event in a student's life, though the 
actual interview was always softened by a noble 
courtesy on the President's part into an expe- 
rience which left an impress throughout life and 
ever remained a cherished memory. 

To one thus summoned, the General urged 
greater attention to study, on the ground that 
it would prevent the failure which would other- 
wise inevitably come to him. 

" But, General, you failed," said the youth — 
meaning, as he explained afterward, to pay 
him a tribute. 

"I hope that you may be more fortunate 
than I," replied the General quietly. 

On another occasion, a youth from the far 
South having "cut lectures" to go skating, an 
accomplishment he had just acquired, was 
summoned to appear before the president, and 
having made his defence was told by the General 
that he should not have broken the rule of the 
institution, but should have requested to be 
excused from attendance on lectures. 

"You understand now.^"' 



272 ROBERT E. LEE 

"Yes, sir. Well, General, the ice is fine 
this morning. Vd like to be excused to-day,*' 
promptly replied the ready youngster. 

It was occasionally the habit of the young 
orators who spoke in public at celebrations to 
express their feelings by indulging in compli- 
ments to General Lee, and the reverse of com- 
pliments to "the Yankees." Such references, 
clad in the glowing rhetoric and informed with 
the deep feeling of youthful oratory, never 
failed to stir their audiences and evoke unstinted 
applause. General Lee, however, promptly put 
a stop to this. He notified the speakers that 
such references were to be omitted. "Those 
to me are embarrassing to me; those to the 
North tend to promote ill feeling and injure 
the institution.'' 

Among the students at this time were quite 
a number who had been soldiers and were ha- 
bituated to a degree of freedom. Pranks among 
the students were, of course, common, and were 
not dealt with harshly. One episode, however, 
occurred which showed the strong hand in the 
soft gauntlet. 

Prior to General Lee's installation as presi- 
dent, it had always been the custom to grant 
at least a week's holiday at Christmas. This 
custom the faculty, under the president's lead, 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 273 

did away with, and thenceforth only Christmas 
Day was given as a hoHday. 

A petition to return to the old order having 
failed, a meeting of the students was held and 
a paper was posted containing many signatures 
declaring the signers' determination not to at- 
tend lectures during Christmas week. Some 
manifestation appeared on the part of certain 
of the faculty of giving in to the students' de- 
mand. General Lee settled the matter at once 
by announcing that any man whose name ap- 
peared on the rebellious declaration would be 
expelled from the college. And if every student 
signed it, he said, he 'would send every one home 
and simply lock up the college and put the key 
in his pocket. 

The activity displayed in getting names off 
the paper was amusing, and the attendance 
at lectures that Christmas was unusually large. 

I cannot forbear to relate a personal incident 
which I feel illustrates well General Lee's 
method of dealing with his students. I was so 
unfortunate while at college as to have always an 
early class, and from time to time on winter 
mornings it was my habit "to run late," as the 
phrase went. This brought me in danger of 
meeting the president on his way from chapel, 
a contingency I was usually careful to guard 



274 ROBERT E. LEE 

against. One morning, however, I miscalcu- 
lated, and as I turned a corner came face to 
face with him. His greeting was most civil, and 
touching my cap I hurried by. Next moment 
I heard my name spoken, and turning I re- 
moved my cap and faced him. 

"Yes, sir." 

"Tell Miss (mentioning the daughter 

of my uncle. General Pendleton, who kept 
house for him) that I say will she please have 
breakfast a little earlier for you." 

"Yes, sir." And I hurried on once more, re- 
solved that should I ever be late again I would, 
at least, take care not to meet the General. 

Craving due allowance alike for the imma- 
turity of a boy and the mellowing influence of 
passing years, I will try to picture General Lee 
as I recall him, and as he must be recalled by 
thousands who yet remember him. He was. in 
common phrase, one of the handsomest men I 
ever knew and easily the most impressive looking. 
His figure, which in earlier life had been tall and 
admirably proportioned, was now compact and 
rounded rather than stout, and was still in fine 
proportion to his height. His head, well set on his 
shoulders, and his erect and dignified carriage 
made him a distinguished and, indeed, a noble 
figure. His soft hair and carefully trimmed beard, 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 275 

silvery white, with his florid complexion and dark 
eyes, clear and frank, gave him a pleasant and 
kindly expression, and I remember how, when he 
smiled, his eyes twinkled and his teeth shone. 
He always walked slowly, and even pensively, 
for he was, without doubt, already sensible 
of the trouble which finally struck him down; 
and the impression that remains with me chiefly 
is of his dignity and his gracious courtesy. I do 
not remember that we feared him at all, or even 
stood in awe of him. Collegians stand in awe 
of few things or persons. But we honored him 
beyond measure, and after nearly forty years 
he is still the most imposing figure I ever saw. 

Even here, in his seclusion, while honored by 
the best of those who had bravely fought against 
him, he was pursued by the malignity of those 
haters of the South, who, having kept carefully 
concealed while the guns were firing, now that 
all personal danger was over endeavored to 
make amends by assailing with their clamor 
the noblest of the defeated. It was a period of 
passion, and those who, under other conditions, 
might have acted with deliberation and reason, 
gave the loose to their feeling, and surrendered 
themselves blindly to the direction of their wild- 
est and most passionate leaders. Those against 
whose private life the purity of his life was an 



276 ROBERT E. LEE 

ever-burning protest reviled him most bitterly. 
The hostile press of the time was filled with 
railing against him; the halls of Congress rang 
with denunciation of him as a traitor: the fool- 
ish and futile yelping of the cowardly pack that 
ever gather about the wounded and spent lion. 
And with what noble dignity and self-command 
he treated it all! To the nobility of a gentleman 
he added the meekness of a Christian. When, 
with a view to setting an example to the South, 
he applied to be included in the terms of the 
general amnesty finally offered, his application 
was ignored, and to his death he remained "a 
prisoner on parole." 

He was dragged before high commissions and 
was cross-examined by hostile prosecutors pant- 
ing to drive or inveigle him into some admission 
which would compromise him, but without avail, 
or even the ignoble satisfaction to his enemies 
that they had ruffled his unbroken calm. 

From this time he gave all the weight of his 
great name to the complete re-establishment 
of the Union, and as his old soldiers followed 
and obeyed him on the field of battle, so now 
the whole South followed him in peace. Only 
the South knows as yet what the Union owes 
to Lee. 

Happily, as we know, his serene soul, lifted 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 277 

too high to be disturbed by any storms of doubt, 
was untroubled by any question born of his 
failure. "I did nothing more/* he said to Gen- 
eral Hampton, one of his most gallant lieuten- 
ants, "than my duty required of me; I could 
have taken no other course without dishonor, 
and if it were all to be done over again, I should 
act in precisely the same manner." 

Thus, in the lofty calm of a mind conscious 
of having tried faithfully to follow ever the 
right; of having obeyed without question the 
command of duty, in simple reliance on the 
goodness of God, the great captain passed the 
brief evening of his life, trying by his constant 
precept and example to train the young men 
of the South as Christian gentlemen. 

He read little on the war, and though he at 
one time contemplated writing a history of, at 
least, some part of it, he put aside the tempta- 
tion and contented himself with writing a brief 
memoir of his honored father to accompany a 
new and revised edition which he edited of the 
latter's "Memoirs of the War in the Southern 
Department of the United States." 

It was his diversion to ride his old war-horse, 
Traveller, among the green hills of that beauti- 
ful country about Lexington, at times piloting 
through the bridle-paths the little daughters of 



278 ROBERT E. LEE 

some professor, sun-bonneted and rosy, riding 
two astride the same horse; or now and then 
meeting an old soldier who asked the privilege 
of giving for him once more the old cheer, which 
in past days had at sight of him rung out on so 
many a hard-fought field. 

One of his biographers* relates that seeing him 
one day talking at his gate with a stranger to 
whom, as he ended, he gave some money, he 
enquired who the stranger was. "One of our 
old soldiers," said the General. "To whose 
command did he belong?" "Oh, he was one 
of those who fought against us," said General 
Lee. " But we are all one now, and must make 
no difference in our treatment of them." 

Thus, in simple duties and simple pleasures, 
untouched by the slings and arrows of outra- 
geous fortune, he passed life's close among his 
own people, a hallowed memory forever to those 
who knew him, an example to all who lived in 
that dark time, or shall live hereafter; the pat- 
tern of a Christian gentleman, who did justice, 
loved mercy, and walked humbly with his God. 

No more devout or humble Christian ever 
lived than he. 

His last active work was done in a vestry meet- 
ing of his church, whose rector was one of his 

* Rev. J. Wm. Jones. 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 279 

old lieutenants, the Rev. Dr. Wm. N. Pendle- 
ton, formerly his chief of artillery; his last 
conscious act was to ask God's blessing at his 
board. As he ended, his voice faltered and he 
sank in his chair. 

Surrounded by those who honored and loved 
him best, he lingered for a few days, murmur- 
ing at times orders to one of the best of his lieu- 
tenants, the gallant A. P. Hill, who had fallen 
at Five Forks, till on the 12th day of October, 
1870, he that was vaUant for truth passed quietly 
to meet the Master he had served so well, "and 
all the trumpets sounded for him on the other 
side." 

Many places claimed the honor of guarding 
his sepulchre; but to Lexington it was fittingly 
awarded. Here he lived and here he died, and 
here in the little mountain town in the Valley 
of Virginia his sacred ashes he hard by those of 
his great lieutenant, who, in the fierce sixties, 
was his right arm. 

Happy the town that has two such shrines! 
Happy the people that have two such examples! 
Both have forever ennobled the soldier's pro- 
fession, where to face death in obedience to 
duty is a mere incident of the life. Both were 
worthy successors of that noble centurion of 
whom Christ said, "I have not found so great 



28o ROBERT E. LEE 

faith; no, not in Israel." Well may we apply 
to him his own words, written about the pro- 
posal to remove the remains of the Confederate 
dead from Gettysburg: "I know of no fitter 
resting place for a soldier than the field on 
which he has nobly laid down his life." 

To those of us who knew him in the im- 
pressionable time of our youth, as, untouched 
by the furious railing of his enemies, he passed 
the evening of his life in unruffled calm, he 
seems the model of a knightly gentleman, ever 
loyal to duty and ever valiant for truth. 

Well might he have said with that other 
Valiant-for-truth : "My sword I give to him that 
shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my cour- 
age and skill to him that can get it. My marks 
and scars I carry with me to be a witness for me 
that I have fought His battles who will now be 
my rewarder." 

No sooner had he passed away than the ig- 
noble enemies of the South, safe at the moment 
from her resentment, set forth anew to insult 
her people by the rancor of their insults to her 
honored dead. While her bells were tolling, 
the halls of Congress and the hostile press rang 
anew with diatribes against her fallen leader. 

But the wolfish hatred that had hounded him 
so long and now broke forth in one last bitter 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 281 

chorus was soon drowned in the acclaim of the 
world that one had passed away whose Hfe had 
honored the whole human race. 

The world had already recognized and fixed 
him forever among her constellation of great 
men, and the European press vied with that 
of the South in rendering him the tribute of 
honor. Thus, the only effect of the attacks 
made on him by the enemies of the South was 
to secure for them the hatred or contempt of 
the Southern people. 

"As obedient to law as Socrates," wrote of 
him one who had studied his character well, and 
the type was well chosen. All through his 
life he illustrated this virtue; and never so fully 
as when he put aside high preferment in the 
profession he so passionately loved and so nobly 
illustrated to obey the laws under which he had 
been reared and cast in his lot with his people, 
though the sacrifice cost him tears of blood. 
Among the foolish charges made by some in the 
hour of passion was this: that he believed the 
South would win in the war and achieve its 
independence, whereupon he would be its idol. 
In other words, that he was lured by ambition. 
Only ignorance wedded to passion could assert 
so baseless a charge. Even had he thus imagined 
that the South might win its independence, Lee 



282 ROBERT E. LEE 

was, of all men, the last to be swayed by such 
a consideration. But as a fact, we know that it 
was at great sacrifice he made his choice and 
that only the purest motives of love of Liberty 
and obedience to Duty influenced his choice. 
The entrance of Virginia into the Confederacy 
of the South threw him out of the position to 
which his rank entitled him. But while others 
wrangled and scrambled for oflftce and rank, he 
with utter self-abnegation declared himself 
"willing to serve anywhere where he could be 
most useful." And it is known to those who 
knew him well that at one time he even thought 
of enlisting as a private in the company com- 
manded by his eldest son, Captain G. W. C. 
Lee.* Such simplicity and virtue are antique. 
Field Marshall Viscount Wolseley, referring 
long afterward to his first meeting with Lee, 
in the summer of 1862, says: "Every incident 
in that visit is indelibly stamped on my memory. 
All he said to me then and during subsequent 
conversations is still fresh in my recollection. 
It is natural it should be so; for he was the 
ablest general and to me seemed the greatest 
man I ever conversed with, and yet I have had 
the privilege of meeting Von Moltke and Prince 
Bismarck. General Lee was one of the few 

* Jones's "Life and Letters of Robert E. Lee," p. 164. 



LEE AS COLLEGE PRESIDENT 283 

men who ever seriously impressed and awed 
me with their inherent greatness. Forty years 
have come and gone since our meeting and yet 
the majesty of his manly bearing, the genial, 
winning grace, the sweetness of his smile, and 
the impressive dignity of his old-fashioned style 
of dress, come back to me among my most cher- 
ished recollections. His greatness made me 
humble and I never felt my own insignificance 
more keenly than I did in his presence. . . . He 
was, indeed, a beautiful character, and of him 
it might truthfully be written, 'In righteousness 
did he judge and make war!'" 



CHAPTER XVIII 

SOURCES OF CHARACTER 

npHERE is something in all of us that responds 
to the magic of military prowess. That wise 
observer, Dr. Johnson, once said: "Every man 
thinks meanly of himself for not having been a 
soldier or been at sea," and when Boswell said, 
"Lord Mansfield would not be ashamed of it," 
he replied, "Sir, if Lord Mansfield were in the 
presence of generals and admirals who had seen 
service, he would wish to creep under the table. 
. . . If Socrates and Charles XII. of Sweden 
were in company, and Socrates should say, 
* Follow me and hear a lecture on philosophy,' 
and Charles XII. should say, 'Follow me and 
help me to dethrone the Czar,' a man would be 
ashamed to follow Socrates." 

Military glory is so dazzling that it blinds 
wholly most men; and a little all men. An Alex- 
ander conquering worlds until he weeps because 
no more are left to conquer; a Hannibal crossing 
the Alps and blowing his trumpets outside the 
very gates of Rome; Caesar and Napoleon over- 

284 



SOURCES OF CHARACTER 285 

sweeping Europe with their victorious eagles, 
are so splendid that the radiance of their achieve- 
ments makes us forget the men they were. Alex- 
ander carousing at Babylon; Caesar plotting 
to overthrow his country's liberties; Napoleon 
steeping the world in blood, but bickering in his 
confinement at St. Helena, are not pleasant to 
contemplate. There the habiliments of majesty 
are wanting; the gauds of pomp are stripped 
off and we see the men at their true worth. 

Now, let us turn for a moment to Lee. Had 
we known him only as the victor of Mechanics- 
ville, Fredericksburg, Manassas, Chancellors- 
ville and Cold Harbor, we should have, indeed, 
thought him a supreme soldier. But should we 
have known the best of him .? Without Gettys- 
burg, without the long campaign of 1864, with- 
out the siege of Petersburg and without Appo- 
mattox, should we have dreamed of the subHme 
greatness of the man ^ 

History may be searched in vain to find Lee's 
superior, and only once or twice in its long 
course will be found his equal. To find his 
prototype, we must go back to ancient times, 
to the half-legendary heroes who have been 
handed down to us by Plutarch's matchless 
portraiture; yet, as we read their story, we see 
that we have been given but one side of their 



286 ROBERT E. LEE 

character. Their weaknesses have mainly been 
lost in the lapse of centuries, and their virtues 
are magnified in the enhaloing atmosphere of 
time. But, as to Lee, we know his every act. 

There was no act nor incident of his life on 
which a light as fierce as that which beats upon 
a throne did not fall. He had in his lifetime 
what Macaulay, in speaking of Dr. Johnson, 
terms "posthumous fame." He was investi- 
gated by high commissions; his every act was 
examined by hostile prosecutors. His conduct 
was inquired into by those who had every in- 
centive of hostility to secure his downfall and 
his degradation. Yet, amid these fierce as- 
saults, he remained as unmoved as he had stood 
when he had held the heights of Fredericks- 
burg against the furious attacks of Burnside's 
intrepid infantry. From this inquisition he 
came forth as unsoiled as the mystic White 
Knight of the Round Table. In that vivid 
glare he stood revealed like the angel bathed 
in light; the closest scrutiny but brought forth 
new virtues and disclosed a more rounded char- 
acter: 

"Like Launcelot brave, like Galahad clean." 

Had he been Regulus, we know that he would 
have returned to Carthage with undisquieted 



SOURCES OF CHARACTER 287 

brow to meet his doom. Had he been Aristides, 
we know that he would have faithfully inscribed 
his name on the shell entrusted to him for his 
banishment. Had he been Caesar, none but 
a fool would have dared to offer him a crown. 
Ambition could not have tempted him; Ease 
could not have beguiled him; Pleasure could not 
have allured him. 

Should we come down to later times, where 
shall we find his counterpart, unless we take 
the Bayards, the Sidneys and the Falklands, 
the highest of the noblest ? 

So, to get his character as it is known to thou- 
sands, we must take the best that was in the 
best that the history of men has preserved. 
Something of Plato's calm there was; all of 
Sidney's high-mindedness; of Bayard's fearless 
and blameless life; of the constancy of William 
the Silent, of whom it was said that he was 
Tranquillus in arduis. It has been finely said 
of him* that, "He was Caesar without his ambi- 
tion, Frederick without his tyranny, Napoleon 
without his selfishness and Washington without 
his reward." 

But most of all, he was like Washington. 
Here — ^in that great Virginian — and here only do 
we find what appears to be an absolute parallel. 

* By Senator Hill of Georgia. 



288 ROBERT E. LEE 

Something must account for this wonderful 
development. Character does not reach such 
consummate flowering alone, and by accidental 
cause! It is a product of various forces and 
such a character as Lee's is the product of high 
forces met in conjunction. Genius may be born 
anywhere; it is a result of prenatal forces. A 
Keats may come from a horse-jobber's fireside; 
a Columbus may spring from a wool-comber's 
home; a Burns may come from an Ayrshire cot- 
tage; but it is a law of Nature that character 
is a result largely of surrounding conditions, 
previous or present. 

A distinguished scholar* has called attention 
to the resemblance between the situation of the 
Southerners in the Civil War and the Southern 
Greeks in the Peloponesan War. He has 
further noted the resemblance in certain funda- 
mental elements of character between the Vir- 
ginians and both the Greeks and the Romans, 
marking particularly their poise, a poise unaf- 
fected by conditions which might startle or 
seduce. The Greeks and the Romans were 
both peoples of the South, and like the Southern 
people whose character Lee illustrated, their 
successes were founded upon their character as 
a people, among the elements of which were a 

* Dr. Basil L. Gildersleeve. 



SOURCES OF CHARACTER 289 

passion for liberty and a passion for dominance. 
It was this poise which Lee illustrated so ad- 
mirably throughout life, a poise which, as Dr. 
Gildersleeve has said, gave opportunity for first 
the undazzled vision, and then the swoop of the 
eagle. 

Whatever open hostility or carping criticism 
may say in derogation of Southern life, and it 
may be admitted that there was liable to be the 
waste and inertia of all life that is easy and 
secluded; yet, the obvious, the unanswerable re- 
ply is that it produced such a character as Rob- 
ert E. Lee. As Washington was the consum- 
mate flower of the life of Colonial Virginia, so 
Lee, clinging close to "his precious example," 
became the perfect fruit of her later civihzation. 

It was my high privilege to know him when 
I was a boy. It was also my privilege to 3ee 
something of that army which followe-^.'nm 
throughout the war, and on whose cOur.'ge 
and fortitude his imperishable glory as a ca|l^ 
tain is founded. I question whether in all the 
army under his command was one man who 
had his genius; but I believe that in character, 
he was but the type of his order, and as noble 
as was his, ten thousand gentlemen marched 
behind him who, in all the elements of private 
character, were his peers. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE HERITAGE OF THE SOUTH 

T STOOD not a great while ago on the most im- 
pressive spot, perhaps, in all Europe: be- 
neath the majestic dome of the Invalides where 
stands the tomb of Napoleon. It was a summer 
evening, and we descended the steps and stood at 
the door of the crypt where repose the ashes of 
him who was doubtless the greatest soldier of 
all time; who by his genius took France from 
the throes of a revolution and lifted her while 
he lived, to the head of the nations. Just then 
th^-hour came for closing, and suddenly an the 
rr'iroie rotunda above us began the roll of a 
.irum, which swelled and throbbed until the 
whole earth seemed reverberating to its martial 
tone. It was the long roll which had sounded 
before so many hard-fought fields, and as it 
throbbed and throbbed in the faUing dusk of 
that summer evening, there seemed to troop be- 
fore the mental vision the long lines that had 
fought and fallen on so many a glorious field: 

290 



THE HERITAGE OF THE SOUTH 291 

the soldiers of Lodi and of Austerlitz, of Fried- 
land and Wagram and Borodino. 

So, as I have immersed myself in the subject 
of this great captain and noble gentleman, there 
has appeared to come before me from a misty 
past that other army, inspired by higher mo- 
tives — by the highest motive : love of Liberty, on 
whose imperishable deeds is founded the fame 
of an even greater, because a nobler soldier; that 
army of the South, composed not only of the 
best that the South had, but wellnigh of all she 
had. Gentle and simple, old and young, rich 
and poor, secessionist and anti-secessionist, 
with every difference laid aside, animated by 
one common spirit: love of country, they flocked 
to the defence of the South. Through four years 
they withstood to the utmost the fiercest assaults 
of fortune, and submitted only with their anni- 
hilaticn. 

''The benediction of the o'ercovering Heavens 
Fall on their heads like dew, for they were worthy 
To inlay Heaven with stars." 

Through more than twice four years their 
survivors and their children endured what was 
bitterer than the sharpest agony of the battle- 
time, and strong in the consciousness of their 
rectitude, came out torn and bleeding, but 



292 ROBERT E. LEE 

victorious. Such fortitude, such courage and 
sublime constancy cannot be in vain. The 
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church; 
so the blood of patriots is the seed of liberty. 
The history of their valor and their fortitude 
in defence of Constitutional Liberty is the heri- 
tage of the South, a heritage in which the North 
will one day be proud to claim a share, as she 
will be the sharer in their work. 

Some day, doubtless, there will stand in the 
Nation's capital a great monument to Lee, 
erected not only by the Southern people, whose 
glory it is that he was the fruit of their civiliza- 
tion and the leader of their armies; but by the 
American people, whose pride it will be that he 
was their fellow-citizen. Meantime he has a 
nobler monument than can be built of marble 
or of brass. His monument is the adoration of 
the South; his shrine is in every Southern heart. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX A 

Extracts from Letter to Author from 
General Marcus J. Wright 

Washington, September 26, 1907. 
********* 

The military population (men between eighteen 
and forty-five years old, not exempt by law) of the 
Northern States in i860, was 3,769,020, omitting 
California, Colorado, Dakota, District of Columbia, 
Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washing- 
ton Territory and West Virginia, not given in the 
tables, but which may be stated as aggregating 135,627. 
This added to 3,769,020, the military population of 
eighteen Northern States makes a total of 3,904,647 
subject to military duty in the States and Territories 
of the North. 

The military population of the Southern States 
(exclusive of Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) in 
i860, was 1,064,193. Deducting from this number 
the 86,009 ^^^^ entered the Federal service and 80,000, 
the estimated number of Union men who did not 
take up arms, there remained to the Confederacy 
898,184 men capable of bearing arms from which 
to draw. 

295 



296 APPENDIX 

It stands thus: 

Military population of the North 3,904,647 
Military population of the South 898,184 

Difference in favor of the North 3,006,463 
The military population in i860: 

Of Kentucky 180,589 

" Maryland 102,715 

*' Missouri 232,781 

516,085 

These three States gave to the Federal army 231,509 
men. Of these 190,744 were v^hites and 40,765 Vi^ere 
negroes. 

An official published statement of the Adjutant- 
General of the United States Army gives the total 
number of men called for and furnished to the United 
States Army from April 15, 1861, to the close of the 
v^ar as 2,865,028 men. Of this number 186,017 v^ere 
negroes and 494,900 v^ere foreigners. 

From all reliable data that could be secured, it has 
been estimated by the best authorities that the strength 
of the Confederate armies v^as about 600,000 men, 
and of this number not more than two-thirds were 
available for active duty in the field. The necessity 
of guarding a long line of exposed seacoast, of main- 
taining permanent garrisons at different posts on inland 
waters, and at numerous other points, deprived the 
Confederate Army in the field of an accession of 
strength. 



APPENDIX 297 

The large preponderance of Federal forces was 
manifest in all the important battles and campaigns 
of the war. The largest force ever assembled by the 
Confederates was at the seven days' fight around 
Richmond. 

General Lee's report showed 80,835 men present 
for duty, when the movement against General Mc- 
Clellan commenced, and the Federal forces numbered 

115,249. 

At Antietam the Federals had 87,164, and the 
Confederates 35,255. 

At Fredericksburg the Federals had 110,000 and 
the Confederates 78,110. 

At Chancellorsville the Federals had 131,661, of 
which number only 90,000 were engaged, and the 
Confederates had 57,212. 

At Gettysburg the Federals had 95,000, and the 
Confederates 44,000. 

At the Wilderness the Federals had 141,160, and 
the Confederates 63,981. 

At the breaking of the Confederate lines at Peters- 
burg, April I, 1865, General Lee commenced his re- 
treat with 32,000 men, and eight days after he surren- 
dered to General Grant, who had a force of 1 20,000 men. 

From the latter part of 1862 until the close of the 
war in 1865, there was a constant decrease of the 
numerical strength of the Confederate Army. On 
the other hand, the records show that during that 
time the Federal Army was strengthened to the extent 
of S^S'SQO men. 



298 



APPENDIX 



The available strength of the Confederate Army at 
the close of the war has been the subject of much 
discussion. 

Estimates have been made varying from 150,000 
to 250,000 men. 

The number of paroles issued to Confederate sol- 
diers may be taken as a basis of calculation. Mr. 
Edvs^in M. Stanton, Secretary of War, on November 22, 
1865, made the following official statement of pris- 
oners, surrendered by different Confederate armies 
that were paroled: 

Army of Northern Virginia . . . 27,805 

Army of Tennessee 3i>243 

Army of Missouri 7j978 

Army of Department of Alabama . 42,293 

Army of Trans-Mississippi Dept. . 17,686 

Army of Department of Florida . 6,428 

133.433 

Miscellaneous Departments of Vir- 
ginia 9,072 

Cumberland, Maryland, &c. . . 9,377 

Department of Washington . . . 3,390 
In Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, 

Alabama, Louisiana and Texas . 13,922 

Nashville and Chattanooga . . . 5,029 



40,790 



These two lists aggregate 174,223, the number of 
paroled Confederates reported by Secretary Stanton. 



APPENDIX 



299 



Those who have estimated the strength of the Con- 
federate Army at the close of the war at 250,000 
reached that result by adding to the 174,223 the 
number of men, 75,777, which they assumed to have 
returned to their homes without paroles. If this 
were true, it would appear, taking into account the 
40,790 mien reported as paroled at various places, 
that 116,567 Confederate soldiers did not surrender, 
and were not paroled with the armies to which they 
belonged. 

This is at variance with the estimated strength of 
these armies just previous to the surrender. 

The report of Secretary Stanton is misleading, be- 
cause it conveys the impression that the 174,223 men 
reported as paroled were bearing arms at the time of 
their surrender. An examination of the parole lists 
shows that such was not the case. These lists em- 
brace men in hospitals, men retired from the army by 
reason of disability and non-arms bearing men who 
sought paroles as a safeguard. There were Con- 
federate soldiers who returned to their homes without 
paroles, but they did not exceed in number those em- 
braced in Secretary Stanton's list, that were not borne 
upon the roll. 

In April, 1865, the aggregate of present and absent 
showed the strength of the Confederate Army to be 
about 275,000 men. Of this number 65,387 were in 
Federal military prisons and 52,000 were absent by 
reason of disability and other causes. Deducting the 
total of these two numbers, 117,387 from 275,000, we 



300 APPENDIX 

have 157,613 as showing the full effective strength of 
the Confederate Army at the close of the vs^ar: 

SUMMARY 

Strength of Federal Army at close of vs^ar: 

Present 797,807 

Absent 202,700 

1,000,507 

Strength of Confederate Army at close of war: 

Present ^57fi^3 

Absent ii7>387 

275,000 

He******** 

(Signed) 

Marcus J. Wright. 



Extract from Letter to Author from Colonel 
Thomas C. Livermore 

grant's army present for duty 

On the Rapidan and James, April 30, 1864, 168,198 
(68 War Records— 69 W. R., 195-198-427). 

On the James, May, 31, 1864, 133,728 (69 W. R., 
426-427). 

On the James, January 31, 1865, 99,214 (95 W. R.,6i). 

On the James, February 25, 1865, 98,457 (Ibid.). 

On the James, March 31, 1865, 100,907 (Ibid.). 

lee's army present for duty 

On the Rapidan and James, Army of North Virginia, 
April 30, 1864, 54,344 (60 W. R., 1,297-1,298). 

2 div. and McLaw's brigade (est. 1,253) of Longstreet's 
corps, March 31, 1864, 10,428* (59 W. R., 721). 

Dept. of Richmond, April 20, 1864, 7,265 (60W. R., 
1,299). 
Total, 72,037. 

On the James, January 31, 1865, 57,387! (95 W. R., 
386-95 W. R., 387, 388, 389, 390). 

* Colonel Taylor of Lee's stafif and Longstreet in their books 
estimate Longstreet's command at 10,000. 

t Excluding the cavalry of the Valley District, the number of 
which is not reported, but probably was about 1,000 (Warren Court, 
482). 



302 APPENDIX 

On the James, February 25, 1865, 63,500 * 
On the James, March 31, 1865, 56,840! (97 W. R., 
i>33i> Warren Court, 482). 

(Signed) T. C. Livermore. 

* The number of the infantry estimated at about 7 per cent, and 
the cavalry at about 15 per cent, more than the "effectives" re- 
ported. 

t The result of deducting estimated losses and desertions re- 
ported and estimated, at 6,760 for March, from number given 
above for February, 25. 



APPENDIX B 

Extract from Letter to Author from Andrew 
R. Ellerson, Esq., of Ellerson's, Hanover 
County, Va. 

Richmond, Virginia, June lo, 1908. 

Before the battles around Richmond began, my 
regiment (4th Virginia Cavalry) v^as encamped on 
the extreme left of the army in the neighborhood of 
Goodall's. The day before the battle of Mechanics- 
ville, my company (Company G) was detached from 
the regiment and camped that night at Emanuel 
Church, a few miles north of Richmond. The next 
morning Jack Stark and myself were ordered to report 
to General Longstreet, for what purpose we had no 
idea, but congratulated ourselves upon the fact that we 
should at least make a good breakfast. * * * T\\q 
evening of the battle of Cold Harbor, General Long- 
street got each division of his corps and placed them in 
position. This was just before the battle com- 
menced. I stood in the front until the bullets were 
flying thick and fast, and feeling very uncomfortable, 
and having no business there, I thought I would retire 
to a hill in the rear where I could have the pleasure of 

303 



304 APPENDIX 

looking on at a battle without being in any apparent 
danger. Upon this hill I found General Jackson, 
seated entirely alone upon his horse. We had been 
there some time when a shell burst some few feet to his 
left, and in a few minutes a second shell burst. Even 
before this time I had become again very uncomfort- 
able, and would have liked very much to change my 
position, but I did not like to show the white feather 
in the presence of General Jackson, who had not 
winced, but after the second shell had burst near him, 
he remarked in a quiet way, "When two shells burst 
near you it is well to change your position if you can 
do so," so we both rode some distance to our right 
and got out of range of the bullets. 

That night General Lee and General Longstreet 
made their head-quarters in Hogan's dwelling. I was 
sitting on the steps of this building about ten o'clock, 
when General Jackson rode up with Lincoln Sydnor, 
who was his guide on this occasion. General Jackson 
gave his horse to Sydnor to hold and went into the 
house, as I afterward learned, for a consultation with 
all of the higher officials of the army. Sydnor told me 
that the reason General Jackson reached Cold Harbor 
as late as he did was due to the fact that, although he 
was very near his old home, and where he was perfectly 
familiar with the country, the Yankees had cut down 
so many trees and made so many new roads that he 
actually got lost, and that just before reaching the 
point to which General Jackson had directed him to 
guide him, he found that he was on the wrong road, 



APPENDIX 305 

and had to turn round the artillery in the woods and 
had to countermarch for quite a distance, which de- 
layed them very materially. Sydnor told me that 
General Ewell, who was present, wanted to hang him 
to a tree, but General Jackson said it was all right; 
that we would get there in plenty of time. You know 
General Jackson has been frequently blamed for being 
late on this occasion, and it has often occurred to me 
that this simple reason may have been the cause of it, 
although I never heard it so stated. * * * 

With best wishes and kind remembrances, I am 
* * * Yours, 

A. R. Ellerson. 



NOTE 
To Mr. Charles Francis Adams, I wish, before closing this brief 
memoir, to make my acknowledgments for his courage, his breadth 
and the classic charm of his recent addresses on Lee. He is the 
worthy son and namesake of that true gentleman who, when 
taunted in England with the victories won by the Confederate 
generals, replied nobly, " They are my countrymen." It was the 
same note which Lee sounded at Chambersburg in his order to 
his then conquering army and which he ever sounded to the end. 

T. N. P. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Adams, Charles Francis, Sr., 
mentioned, 57; his estimate 
of Lee, 155; his opinion of 
the Southern Army, 175; 
prevents the dehvery of iron- 
clads by England to the 
Confederacy, 230-231. 

Blair, The Hon. Montgom- 
ery, mentioned, 32. 

Blair, The Hon. Francis P., 
mentioned, 32. 

Beauregard, General, C S. A., 
mentioned, 53. 

Butler, Benjamin, General, U. 
S. A. mentioned, 91; his 
order in Louisiana, 166. 

Cameron, The Hon. Simon, 
mentioned, 32. 

Carter, Anne, mother of R. E. 
Lee, mentioned, 5. 

Cobb, Howell, General, C. S. A., 
mentioned, 168. 

Cold Harbor, battle of, 208- 
209. 

Custis, Mary Parke, her mar- 
riage to R. E. Lee, 16. 

Davis, Jefferson, his letter 
to General Lee after Gettys- 
burg, 198-200. 

Douglass, Colonel, C. S. A., 
killed at Sharpsburg, 129. 

Du Pont, Admiral, U. S. N., 
reduces the forts on Port 
Royal Inlet, 90. 



Ellerson, Andrew R., letter 
from, Appendix B, 303-305. 

Ewell, General, C S. A., at the 
battle of Sharpsburg, 129. 

Farragut, Admiral, U. S. N., 
leads his fleet up the Missis- 
sippi, 91. 

Floyd, General, C. S. A., men- 
tioned, 77; mentioned, 159. 

Franklin, General, U. S. A., at 
the battle of Sharpsburg, 132. 

Fredericksburg, battle of, 141- 

145- 
Freemantle, Colonel, officer of 
the British Army. His esti- 
mate of the Southern Army, 
173- 

Garnett, General, U. S. A., 
mentioned, 77. 

Gaines' Mill, battle of, 102- 
103. 

Gettysburg, battle of, 181-197. 

Gordon, General, C. S. A., at 
the battle of Gettysburg, 182. 

Grant, General U. S., as a slave- 
holder, 46; mentioned, 58- 
59; author's opinion of his 
character, 214; crosses the 
Rapidan, 222; adverse criti- 
cism of, 224; his losses in 
the Wilderness campaign, 
226-227; his generosity and 
magnanimity, 256; his de- 
fence of Lee after Appo- 
mattox, 262. 



309 



310 



INDEX 



Greeley, Horace. His criticism 
of Lincoln's methods, 135. 

Hampton, Wade, General, 
C. S. A., mentioned, 55. 

Hartford Convention, the, men- 
tioned, 40. 

Henderson, Colonel G. F. R., 
biographer of Stonewall J ack- 
son, 40-41; quoted, 49-50; 
quoted, 60; his account of the 
battle of Chancellorsville, 
149. 

Hill, A. P., General, C. S. A., 
fight at Meadow Bridge, loi; 
mentioned, 279. 

Hill, D. H., C. S. A., capture of 
Lee's plan of battle in his 
camp, 123-124. 

Hood, General, C. S. A., de- 
struction of his army at 
Nashville, 231. 

Hooker, Fighting Joe, General 
in command of the army of 
the Potomac, 147. 

Jackson, Stonewall, Gen- 
eral, C. S. A., his devotion 
to duty, 56; mentioned, 77; 
explanation of his delay at 
Ashland, 104-107; captures 
Harper's Ferry, 127; sent by 
Lee around Hooker's right at 
Chancellorsville, 148; attacks 
at Bristow Station, 153. 

Janney, Hon. John, speech of, 
71-72. 

Johnson, Reverdy, mentioned, 
32. 

Johnson, President, his treat- 
ment of the South, 263. 

Johnston, Albert Sydney, Gen- 
eral, C. S. A., death of, at 
Shiloh, 90. 

Johnston, Joseph, General, 
C. S. A., mentioned, 15; at- 
tacks Keys at Seven Pines, 
92; relieved from his com- 
mand, 230. 



Jones, J. R., General, C. S. A., 
commander of Jackson's di- 
vision at Sharpsburg, 129. 

Kanawha, the, mentioned, 77. 

Lawton, General, C. S. A., 
wounded at Sharpsburg, 129. 

Lee, Richard, founder of the 
Lee family in America, offers 
Charles II a kingdom in 
Virginia, 4. 

Lee, Thomas, grandson of 
Richard Lee, mentioned, 3. 

Lee, Francis Lightfoot, uncle 
of Robert Lee, mentioned, 4. 

Lee, Richard Henry, father of 
R. E. Lee, mentioned, 4; his 
letter to Mr. Madison, 38. 

Lee, Robert E., birth of, 4; 
ancestry of, 5-6; the influ- 
ence of Washington's char- 
acter on, 8-10; his care of his 
mother and boyhood char- 
acter, 10-12; enters West 
Point, 13-14; Joseph E. 
Johnston's opinion of, 15-16; 
marries Mary Parke Custis, 
16; his first service, 18; ser- 
vice in the Mexican war, 19- 
23; capture of John Brown 
by, 24; his letters to his wife 
quoted, 24-25; manumits 
his slaves, 31; offered com- 
mand of U. S. army by Presi- 
dent Lincoln, 32; resigns 
his commission in U. S. army , 
34; letter to his wife in 1856 
showing his feeling for the 
United States, 42; his oppo- 
sition to secession, 43-44; 
his opposition to a dissolu- 
tion of the Union, 50; letter 
to General Scott, 52-53; let- 
ter to General Beauregard, 
53-54; greatness of Lee as a 
soldier and the resources at 
his command, 57-65; his re- 
ply to the Hon. John Janney, 



INDEX 



3" 



Lee, Robert E. — Continued. 
72-73; assumes command in 
West Virginia, 78; failure to 
capture Rosecrans at Sewell's 
Mountain, 80; failure of his 
first campaign, 81; appointed 
military adviser to Jeflferson 
Davis, 82; placed in com- 
mand of the Confederate 
forces, 92; keeps Fremont 
and McDowell from rein- 
forcing McClellan, 98; de- 
fence of Richmond, 96-103; 
plan for defeat of McClellan, 
100; sends Jackson to circle 
Pope's right, 114; makes a 
stand at Sharpsburg, 126; 
general order of, issued to his 
army after Sharpsburg, 135- 
137; refuses to retreat after 
Antietam, 135; zenith of 
his fame, 145; credit given 
for winning Chancellorsville, 
149; not informed by Stuart 
that Meade was at Gettys- 
burg, 152; his letter to Long- 
street after Gettysburg, 153; 
letter to General G. W. C. 
Lee, 156; his confidence in his 
army, 160; his belief in God, 
162; his general order at 
Chambersburg, Pa., 163; 
his error at Gettysburg, 176; 
plans to invade the North, 
178; his letter to Jefferson 
Davis after Gettysburg, 194- 
197; letters of, showing con- 
dition of Confederate army 
after the Wilderness, 216- 
222; his letter to the Hon. 
T. A. Seddon, 232-234; his 
last stand at Appomattox, 
246-252; his character in de- 
feat, 253-260; his tribute to 
Grant, 257; his soldiers' 
tribute to, after the sur- 
render, 257; his treatment 
by President Johnson after 
the surrender, 261-262; as 



a college president, 269-283; 
his death, 279; his character, 
284-292. 

Lee, Wm. H. F., General, 
C. S. A., son of Robert E. 
Lee, mentioned, 163; held as 
hostage by U. S. Army, 
164. 

Lee, G. W. C, General, C. S. 
A. son of Robert E. Lee, 
164. 

Livermore, Colonel T. C, his 
letter to author giving esti- 
mate of Grant's army, Ap- 
pendix A, 301-302. 

Longstreet, General, conduct 
at the battle of Manassas, 
118; his conduct at Gettys- 
burg responsible for the de- 
feat of Lee, 177; neglects to 
attack at Gettysburg, 185; 
his defence of his failure to 
attack at Gettysburg, 187- 
188; wounded, 205. 

Loring, General, C. S. A., 
mentioned, 77. 

McClellan, George B., Gen- 
eral, U. S. A., his plans 
for attack on Richmond, 86- 
88; besieges Yorktown, 89; 
checked at Williamsburg, 
93; relieves Harper's Ferry, 
124; refuses to allow Frank- 
lin to attack at Sharpsburg, 
133; Lee's opinion of, 140. 

McDowell, General, U. S. A., 
mentioned, 93. 

Mcintosh, Colonel, U. S. A., 
capture of his battery at 
Sharpsburg, 133. 

McLaws, General, C. S. A., 
mentioned, 125. 

Malvern Hill, battle of, 97. 

Manassas, second battle of, 
1 17-120. 

Marshall, Colonel Charles, C. 
S. A., member of Lee's staff, 
154. 



312 



INDEX 



Meade, General, U. S. A., 
mentioned at battle of 
Sharpsburg, 130; at Gettys- 
burg, 183. 

Pendleton, Wm. N., Gen- 
eral, C. S. A., Lee's Chief 
of Artillery, 184. 

Porter, Fitz John, General, 
U. S. A., mentioned, 98; 
mentioned, 121. 

Pope, General, U. S. A., escape 
of, 113. 

Preston, General, U. S. A., 
mentioned, 22. 

Reynolds, General, U. S. A., 
defeated by Lee at Chestnut, 
79- 

Sailor's Creek, battle of, 243. 

Scott, General, his opinion of 
Lee as a soldier in the Mexi- 
can War, 18; considers Lee 
"the greatest living soldier 
in America," 22. 

Sharpsburg, battle of, 129. 

Sheridan, P. H., General, 
U. S. A., defeats Pickett at 
Five Forks, 238. 

Sherman, W. T., General, 
U. S. A., mentioned, 166- 
167; his methods in the 
South compared w^ith Lee's 
in Pennsylvania, 169-17 1; 
offers terms to Johnson, 
251; his order to General 
Wade Hampton for burning 
of Columbia, 253. 

Shirley, home of Lee's mother, 

7- 
Smith, General, U. S. A., at 
battle of Sharpsburg, 132. 



South, the, resources of, 61. 

"Spec," General Lee's dog, 
mentioned, 27. 

Spottsylvania Court House, 
battle of, 206-208. 

Stratford, Lee estate in Vir- 
ginia, named after English 
estate of Richard Lee, 4. 

Stuart, J. E. B., General, 
C. S. A., Stuart's Raid, 99; 
capture of his Adjutant 
General with valuable papers 
by McClellan, 112; capture 
of Pope's headquarters by, 
112; captures Pope's stores 
at Manassas Junction, 116. 

Taylor, W. H., Colonel, 
C. S. A., Lee's Adjutant 
General, his opinion of 
Grant, 211. 

Thomas, General, U. S. A., his 
victory at Mill Springs men- 
tioned, 89. 

"Traveller," General Lee's 
war horse, mentioned, 
27. 

Washington, George, portrait 
of, given to grandmother of 
R. E. Lee, 7. 

Westmoreland, County of, 
mentioned, 3. 

Wise, General, C. S. A., men- 
tioned, 77. 

Wolseley, Viscount, his opinion 
of Lee's campaigns, 5; his 
opinion of Lee at Antietam, 
141; his first meeting with 
Lee, 282. 

Wright, Marcus T., General, 
C. S. A., his letter Appendix 
A, 295-300. 



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